Ukraine war briefing: Alexei Navalny’s widow warns ‘no point trying to negotiate’ with Putin
The widow of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has warned there is “no point trying to negotiate” with Vladimir Putin.
“Just remember: he will lie,” Yulia Navalnaya told the Munich Security Conference on Friday two days before the first anniversary of her husband’s death. “He will betray,” she said about the Russian president. “He will change the rules at the last moment and force you to play his game. There are only two possible outcomes for any deal with Putin. If he remains in power, he will find a way to break the agreement. If he loses power, the agreement will become meaningless.”Navalnaya was joined on a panel discussion by the exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who said “by helping Ukraine, you’re helping the whole region”.
Tikhanovskaya warned if Ukraine did not come out on top after the war, “Putin will be still strong enough to keep his influence on Belarus”. “By putting Ukraine in a strong position during these negotiations, you put also Belarus, Moldova and other countries in a strong position.”Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said
during a meeting with the US vice-president, JD Vance,
that his country wants “security guarantees” and a joint US-Ukrainian peace plan before he enters into any talks with Putin to end the war in his country.
In their first meeting on Friday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Vance said Washington sought to secure a “a durable, lasting peace, not the kind of peace that’s going to have eastern Europe in conflict just a couple years down the road”. Both men hailed it as a “good conversation” and agreed that further talks were required to see if they could reach a common understanding.
Ukraine has a low chance of surviving Russia’s assault without US support, Zelenskyy said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.
“Probably it will be very, very, very difficult. And of course, in all the difficult situations, you have a chance. But we will have low chance – low chance to survive without support of the United States,” the Ukrainian president said in the interview, which is to be broadcast on Sunday.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he assured his Ukrainian counterpart that it’s “Ukrainians alone who can drive the discussions for a solid and lasting peace” with Russia.
“We will help them in this endeavour,” Macron wrote on X on Friday after a phone call with Zelenskyy, adding if Trump “can truly convince President Putin to stop the aggression against Ukraine, that is great news”. Macronearlier warned against a peace deal
over the Ukraine war that would amount to “capitulation” as Trump suggested Russia might not make any concessions in negotiations.The talks between Zelenskyy and Vance ended without an announcement of a critical minerals deal that is central to Kyiv’s push to win the backing of Donald Trump.
Kyiv came back to the US earlier with a revised draft agreement of the deal that could open up its vast resources of key minerals to US investment. “Our teams will continue to work on the document,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. Two members of the Ukrainian delegation told Reuters that “some details” still needed to be worked out. The minerals in question would include rare earth varieties, as well as titanium, uranium and lithium.A Russian drone
caused significant damage
to the radiation containment shelter at the disused Chornobyl nuclear power plant overnight on Friday, the Ukrainian president has said.
The drone struck the radiation shelter, causing a fire that was then extinguished, Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. “According to initial assessments, the damage to the shelter is significant,” he said. Zelenskyy and the UN’s atomic energy watchdog both said that radiation levels remained normal after the incident. Ukraine’s SBU security service showed pictures of what it said was the drone, which it said had been carrying a high-explosive warhead. It said the Iranian-designed Shahed drone intended to hit the reactor enclosure.Chornobyl’s chief engineer, Oleksandr Tytarchuk, said emergency crews were working to minimise the aftermath of the incident.
“The barrier which was supposed to prevent the spread of radioactive substances has ceased to function according to its original design,” Tytarchuk told reporters at the plant. He said the drone “hit the outer cover, pierced it, fell into the system and exploded there”. Had the explosion occurred 15-20 metres further away, he said, “it would have directly hit the old shelter, which is 40 years old”.Russian forces have taken control of two frontline settlements in eastern Donetsk region.
The Russian defence ministry said on Friday its forces had captured the village of Zelene Pole located between Pokrovsk, the focal point of Russian attacks in the region, and Velyuka Novosilka, a settlement that Russia’s military said it captured late last month. Also captured, according to the Russian report, was the village of Dachne, west of the town of Kurakhove. The town had been subjected to weeks of heavy fighting. The Ukrainian general staff, in a late evening report, said both villages were among 11 settlements that had come under Russian attack in the Pokrovsk sector. But it made no mention of them coming under Russian control.