Kyiv, July 14:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Paris on Monday for talks with two dozen European leaders helping Kyiv fight Russia’s invasion, with the war now in its fifth year. European foreign ministers were also meeting separately in Brussels where they were expected to discuss Ukraine’s needs and Russia’s threats to the continent.
Both Kyiv and its European backers are keen to press home Ukraine’s recent successes and compel Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to the fighting, although Moscow has shown no willingness to compromise despite a yearlong peace effort by the Trump administration. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow will closely follow the Paris meeting but dismissed its aspirations.
“This is a coalition of warmongers,” Peskov said. “They are driven by the profound delusion that it’s possible to inflict a strategic defeat on our country, so this is a coalition of the deluded, a coalition of those who incite the war.”
Ukraine’s advances in drone technology have in recent months given it an edge, analysts and Western officials say. Its strikes on supply routes behind the front line have robbed the Russian army of momentum on the battlefield and made its progress slow and costly, they say.
Zelenskyy is keen to move quickly on plans for jointly developing with European countries anti-ballistic air defences that can help stop Russia’s devastating attacks on Ukraine’s power grid.
Ukraine says it hit 105 Russian vessels in 8 days in the Sea of Azov
Ukrainian forces struck 105 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov next to the Crimean peninsula between July 6-13, Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said.
The vessels included tankers, dry cargo ships, a ferry and tugboats, Brovdi said on the Telegram messaging app.
The campaign in the Sea of Azov is part of a broader Ukrainian effort to isolate the Crimean Peninsula, which is enduring its worst fuel crisis since it was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, and disrupt Russian logistics.