Ukraine’s Zelenskyy charting ‘comprehensive plan’ to end war with Russia

Ukrainian president says as the war rages and casualties mount, a plan to end the 28-month conflict is ‘the diplomatic route we are working on’.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he’s drawing up a “comprehensive plan” for how Kyiv believes the war with Russia should end.

“It is very important for us to show a plan to end the war that will be supported by the majority of the world,” the Ukrainian president said at a news conference in Kyiv alongside Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar on Friday.

“This is the diplomatic route we are working on.”

There are no current negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and, based on public statements by Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two sides appear as far apart as ever when it comes to the terms of a potential peace settlement.

Ukraine has repeatedly said Russia must pull its troops out of its internationally recognised territory – including the peninsula of Crimea that Moscow annexed in 2014 – before peace talks can start.

Meanwhile, Putin, who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is demanding Ukraine effectively capitulate by evacuating even more territory across its east and south that Russia now occupies.

Zelenskyy hosted a major international summit in Switzerland earlier this month — and Russia was not invited — to rally support for Ukraine’s position.

‘We don’t have too much time’

More than 90 countries sent leaders and senior officials to the two-day summit and a vast majority agreed to a final communique that stressed the need for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” to be respected in any settlement.

But some key countries that attended, such as India, did not agree and others, such as Russia’s ally China, boycotted the summit in protest at Moscow not being invited.

Russia’s troops are slowly advancing on the battlefield, claiming to have seized another small front-line village on Friday.

Moscow currently occupies about 25 percent of Ukraine and in 2022 claimed to have annexed four more regions, none of which they fully control.

On Thursday, at an EU Council Summit in Brussels, Zelenskyy said he would put forward a “detailed plan” in a matter of months to end the war.

“We don’t have too much time,” he said, pointing to the high casualty rate among soldiers and civilians.

Anger at the US

Russia warned the United States on Friday its reconnaissance drone flights over the Black Sea risked leading to a “direct” military clash, issuing the threat days after angrily blaming Washington for a missile attack on Crimea.

Ukraine’s attack on the Russian-annexed port of Sevastopol on Sunday drew fury from Moscow, which accused Kyiv of using US-supplied ATACMS missiles equipped with cluster munitions.

Four people, including two children, were killed as missile fragments fell over the city, in what the Kremlin’s foreign ministry called a “bloody crime”.

On Friday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it “observed an increased frequency of US strategic unmanned aerial vehicle flights over the waters of the Black Sea” that surrounds Crimea.

Drones are “carrying out reconnaissance” and providing information for Western-supplied Ukrainian weapons that Kyiv plans to use to strike Russian targets, it said.

Such flights “increase the risk of a direct confrontation” between NATO and Russia, and the army has been instructed to prepare an “operational response”, the defence ministry added.

The United States routinely carries out drone flights over the Black Sea, operations that it says are conducted in neutral airspace and in accordance with international law.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said on Friday the military destroyed the Russian space communication centre in Moscow-occupied Crimea in an attack this week.

In a statement on Telegram, the ministry described the target as a valuable military component in satellite communication and navigation system for Russian troops. There was no immediate response from Moscow.