Negotiation is only way out of war, Ukraine's Zelensky says
WASHINGTON, United States — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday renewed his plea for talks with his Russian counterpart, taking to US television to say negotiations were the only way to "end this war."
He stressed that he and President Vladimir Putin were the only principals able to thrash out a deal to stop the fighting, now in its fourth week.
But he signaled he would lay down red lines against ceding Ukrainian territory, including two pro-Moscow breakaway regions.
"I'm ready for negotiations with him," Zelensky told CNN show "Fareed Zakaria GPS."
"I think without negotiations we cannot end this war," the Ukrainian leader said through a translator.
The reiteration of Zelensky's call for peace talks came as he and other Ukrainians accused Russia of committing war crimes after authorities said the invading forces had bombed a school sheltering some 400 people in the besieged city of Mariupol.
"Russian forces have come to exterminate us, to kill us," said Zelensky.
The leader, who has emerged as a national hero for his very public stance against Putin and his forces, has spoken of Ukrainians' fierce resistance to the invasion and told Russia that several thousand of its soldiers have died in battle so far.
"If there is just one percent chance for us to stop this war, I think that we need to take this chance... to have the possibility of negotiating, the possibility of talking to Putin," he said.
"Dialogue is the only way out," and "I think it's just the two of us, me and Putin, who can make an agreement on this," Zelensky said.
"If these attempts fail, that would mean that this is a third world war."
Zelensky repeatedly has warned of the potential for the Russia-Ukraine conflict to mushroom into an all-out global war.
Last month, in a move seen as precipitating the conflict, Putin recognized two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk, as independent entities, and debate has simmered about whether Zelensky might concede the regions as a way to bring the war to a close.
But on Sunday Zelensky stood defiant: "You cannot just demand from Ukraine to recognize some territories as independent republics," he told CNN.
"These compromises are simply wrong," he added. "We have to come up with a model where Ukraine will not lose its sovereignty, it's territorial integrity."
The crisis in Ukraine, in which Putin has sought to eradicate pro-Western leanings in the ex-Soviet state, has already triggered the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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