We are restarting our rolling coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Much of the focus will be around the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, the largest such event since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. We will bring you the latest updates throughout the day.
G7 leaders did not discuss Vladimir Putin’s proposals for peace in Ukraine since everyone knew they were not serious, Olaf Scholz said shortly before leaving for Switzerland, where a Ukraine conference opens on Saturday.
The German chancellor said Putin’s proposals – for Ukraine to abandon four provinces Russia claims, stop fighting and drop its ambition of Nato membership – were aimed only at distracting from the conference.
“Everyone knows that this was proposal wasn’t meant seriously, but had something to do with the peace conference in Switzerland,” he told ZDF television in an interview.
As world leaders gather for the summit, which Russia was not invited to, US vice-president Kamala Harris will stress that the outcome of the war affects the entire world and that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected, a US official has said.
Harris will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and is standing in for US President Joe Biden at the event. The president is returning to the US after attending the G7 in Italy to attend a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in Los Angeles.
The summit comes as G7 leaders clinched a new deal for a €50bn loan for Ukraine, securitised through use of the windfall profits from the interest on Russian central bank assets frozen by the EU and other western nations after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Here’s a summary of the day’s other main events:
Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in Switzerland on Friday ahead of the two-day Ukraine peace summit. Zelenskiy said talks would focus on nuclear safety, food security, the return of prisoners of war and Ukrainian children taken to Russian-controlled territory.
Kamala Harris, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the leaders of Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and Japan are among those set to attend the Swiss summit in Lucerne. Despite months of Ukrainian and Swiss lobbying, some others will not be there, most notably China. The gathering comes after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Moscow would only enter peace talks after Ukraine pulls its troops out of the east and south of the country – a plan which Zelenskiy has dismissed.
On the ground in Ukraine, a Russian airstrike killed one person and injured at least four in the northern Sumy region on Friday, the military administration there said. The strike hit the town of Shostka, about 45km (28 miles) from the border with Russia, it said on Telegram, giving no details about damage. The strike came as Kyiv and Moscow staged dozens of drone and missile attacks overnight on Thursday and during Friday.
Ukrainian attacks on southern Russia’s Belgorod region killed six people on Friday, officials said. Four bodies were pulled from the rubble of a multi-floor apartment building hit by Ukrainian shelling in the border town of Shebekino, Russia’s emergencies ministry said, adding after midnight that 50% of the rubble had been cleared. A Ukrainian drone struck a car in a village near Shebekino, killing the driver, said the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. He said a woman was killed in her home when it was struck by rocket fire in the village of Oktyabrsky, farther west.
Russia launched 17 missiles and nearly 500 drones on Friday, Ukraine’s general staff said. Drone attacks killed a 54-year-old man in the southern Kherson region and injured a 17-year-old girl in the eastern city of Dnipro, regional authorities said. Three people were injured in a drone attack in the eastern Sumy region and several homes damaged in the neighbouring Kharkiv region.
The EU has ramped up its production of projectiles and will match Russia’s production capacity next year, the bloc’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, told French news outlet La Tribune.
World leaders have been commenting on the goals of the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland (see opening summary at 08.28 for more details).
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the event an important step towards progress. He told German news channel Welt TV:
Many questions of peace and security will be discussed, but not the very biggest. That was always the plan.
This is a small plant that needs to be watered, but of course also with the perspective that more can then come out of it.
Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, meanwhile, said the summit aimed to bring home to more geographically distant countries the scale of the threat to the world posed by Moscow.
US vice-president Kamala Harris and the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and Japan are among those due to attend. India, Turkey and Hungary, which maintain friendlier relations with Russia, are also expected to join.
A Russian aircraft violated Swedish airspace east of the Baltic island of Gotland on Friday and was met by two Swedish fighter jets, a spokesperson for Sweden’s armed forces has said.
The Swedish armed forces said the Russian military aircraft, a SU-24, had been hailed with a warning but failed to respond after which two Swedish Gripen fighters were sent up to meet it.
“The Russian actions are not acceptable and show a lack of respect for our territorial integrity,” Swedish air force chief Jonas Wikman said. “We followed the entire chain of events and were in place to intervene.”
In March, Sweden officially became the 32nd member of Nato, in a landmark moment for the historically neutral country. Members of the military alliance agree that if one of them is attacked, the other countries should help it defend itself.
Last week, Finland’s defence ministry said an investigation had been launched after a Russian military plane was suspected of violating Finnish airspace, flying about 2.5 km (1.6 miles) inside the Nordic country’s border.
The violation in the eastern Gulf of Finland lasted for about two minutes, the ministry said, with the country’s defence minister, Antti Hakkanen, warning that Finland, which joined Nato in April 2023, takes “the suspected territorial violation seriously”.
Kherson’s regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, has said a third support centre has been opened to support residents of the Kherson region who were forced to leave their homes due to the war.
“The humanitarian office of the Kherson region has become operational in Kyiv. Every day, its employees serve more than 100 displaced people who have found temporary shelter in the capital and the region. And according to official data alone, there are more than 50,000 such people,” he wrote on Telegram.
Grocery kits, free legal support and psychological support are provided in the centre.
Kherson is among the regional settlements west of the Dnipro River which have reported being frequently targeted by Russian strikes since Ukraine recaptured the area in November 2022.
Geng Shuang, China’s deputy representative to the UN, has called on Ukraine and Russia to start peace talks as soon as possible at the UN security council meeting.
“Weapons may end a war, but they cannot bring lasting peace. China calls on the parties to the conflict to demonstrate political will, come together, and start peace talks as soon as possible to achieve a ceasefire and halt military actions,” Shuang was quoted by the Kyiv Independent on Sunday as telling the meeting.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said that Russia would enter peace talks if Ukraine dropped its Nato ambitions and withdrew its forces from four Ukrainian regions claimed by Moscow (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia). Kyiv has repeatedly said its territorial integrity is non-negotiable.
Organisers of the peace summit played down China’s decision not to attend, a move that prompted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to accuse Beijing of helping Moscow undermine the meeting, which China’s foreign ministry denied.
Kyiv had been pushing hard for a Chinese delegation to attend the summit to give the conference further legitimacy and drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, writes the Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll (you can read more here).
Without China, hopes of isolating Moscow have faded, while recent military reverses have put Kyiv on the back foot.
China had said it would consider taking part in the event in Switzerland, but ultimately declined because Russia would not be there.
“It’s clear that at the moment, in geopolitical terms, for China the special relationship with Russia takes precedence over any other consideration,” Bernardino Regazzoni, a former Swiss ambassador to China, said.
China and Russia proclaimed a “no limits” partnership just days before Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Beijing says it is neutral in the conflict and has not supplied Moscow with weapons or ammunition.
90 states and organisations have registered to take part in the Ukraine peace summit on Saturday and Sunday in the alpine resort of Lucerne, which will seek to build support for Zelenskiy’s peace proposals, including the full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.
We are restarting our rolling coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Much of the focus will be around the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, the largest such event since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. We will bring you the latest updates throughout the day.
G7 leaders did not discuss Vladimir Putin’s proposals for peace in Ukraine since everyone knew they were not serious, Olaf Scholz said shortly before leaving for Switzerland, where a Ukraine conference opens on Saturday.
The German chancellor said Putin’s proposals – for Ukraine to abandon four provinces Russia claims, stop fighting and drop its ambition of Nato membership – were aimed only at distracting from the conference.
“Everyone knows that this was proposal wasn’t meant seriously, but had something to do with the peace conference in Switzerland,” he told ZDF television in an interview.
As world leaders gather for the summit, which Russia was not invited to, US vice-president Kamala Harris will stress that the outcome of the war affects the entire world and that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected, a US official has said.
Harris will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and is standing in for US President Joe Biden at the event. The president is returning to the US after attending the G7 in Italy to attend a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in Los Angeles.
The summit comes as G7 leaders clinched a new deal for a €50bn loan for Ukraine, securitised through use of the windfall profits from the interest on Russian central bank assets frozen by the EU and other western nations after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Here’s a summary of the day’s other main events:
Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in Switzerland on Friday ahead of the two-day Ukraine peace summit. Zelenskiy said talks would focus on nuclear safety, food security, the return of prisoners of war and Ukrainian children taken to Russian-controlled territory.
Kamala Harris, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the leaders of Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and Japan are among those set to attend the Swiss summit in Lucerne. Despite months of Ukrainian and Swiss lobbying, some others will not be there, most notably China. The gathering comes after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Moscow would only enter peace talks after Ukraine pulls its troops out of the east and south of the country – a plan which Zelenskiy has dismissed.
On the ground in Ukraine, a Russian airstrike killed one person and injured at least four in the northern Sumy region on Friday, the military administration there said. The strike hit the town of Shostka, about 45km (28 miles) from the border with Russia, it said on Telegram, giving no details about damage. The strike came as Kyiv and Moscow staged dozens of drone and missile attacks overnight on Thursday and during Friday.
Ukrainian attacks on southern Russia’s Belgorod region killed six people on Friday, officials said. Four bodies were pulled from the rubble of a multi-floor apartment building hit by Ukrainian shelling in the border town of Shebekino, Russia’s emergencies ministry said, adding after midnight that 50% of the rubble had been cleared. A Ukrainian drone struck a car in a village near Shebekino, killing the driver, said the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. He said a woman was killed in her home when it was struck by rocket fire in the village of Oktyabrsky, farther west.
Russia launched 17 missiles and nearly 500 drones on Friday, Ukraine’s general staff said. Drone attacks killed a 54-year-old man in the southern Kherson region and injured a 17-year-old girl in the eastern city of Dnipro, regional authorities said. Three people were injured in a drone attack in the eastern Sumy region and several homes damaged in the neighbouring Kharkiv region.
The EU has ramped up its production of projectiles and will match Russia’s production capacity next year, the bloc’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, told French news outlet La Tribune.
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2024-06-15 07:28:00Z
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