Dan Sabbagh reports<\/a>, after an apparently unproductive phone call between Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov. Their call also led to the cancellation of a meeting planned in Hungary\u2019s capital for this Thursday between Rubio, Donald Trump\u2019s secretary of state, and Lavrov, Vladimir Putin\u2019s foreign minister. A senior European diplomat told Reuters the Russians \u201chaven\u2019t at all changed\u201d their maximalist position of Ukraine giving up the entire Donbas region. \u201cAnd I assume Lavrov gave the same spiel, and Rubio was like: \u2018See you later\u2019.\u201d Another European diplomat thought that \u201cit became evident for the Americans that there will be no deal for Trump in Budapest\u201d.<\/p>\nVolodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia \u201calmost automatically became less interested in diplomacy\u201d once US Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine were no longer an immediate prospect. The Ukrainian president continued: \u201cThe greater the Ukrainian long-range capability, the greater the Russian willingness to end the war \u2026 As soon as the issue of long-range [capability] became a little further away for us \u2013 for Ukraine \u2013 Russia almost automatically became less interested in diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The diplomatic efforts centred around Trump were \u201cgoing in circles\u201d and felt as if they were being dragged out, a senior Ukrainian official told Agence France-Presse. While varying from day to day, Trump\u2019s most recent stance is that the war should be halted along the current frontline without Ukraine making territorial concessions.<\/p>\n
European diplomats meanwhile said countries were working with Ukraine on a new proposal for a ceasefire along current battle lines. One told Reuters the proposal included a reference to a peace board that would be chaired by Trump, while another said it would be modelled on the US 20-point plan on Gaza. Some 35 allies of Ukraine will meet on Friday in London for a summit among countries willing to provide long-term support to Kyiv.<\/p>\n
The European work on a peace proposal seems at least partly calculated to simply keep Washington engaged with helping Ukraine by giving Trump and the US an important role, rather than produce a deal both sides would actually accept. For example, a proposal to siphon off some of Russia\u2019s frozen assets to fund a portion of reparations payments to Ukraine \u201cwould be a non-starter for Russia\u201d, one diplomat said.<\/p>\n
Russian attacks killed four people and left hundreds of thousands without power and many without water in Ukraine\u2019s Chernihiv region on Tuesday. The energy ministry said the regional capital, Chernihiv city, and the northern part of the province lost all electricity supply after strikes on power facilities. By the afternoon, Reuters reporters in Chernihiv saw that power supply was back in some places. A daytime attack by about 20 Russian kamikaze drones killed four civilians and wounded at least seven more including a 10-year-old child in the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi, local officials said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Storm Shadow missiles struck a Russian chemical plant making gunpowder, explosives and rocket fuel in the Bryansk region,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-216895","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}