Ukraine’s “victory plan” in the war against Russia depends on quick decisions being taken by allies this year, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday during a visit by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
Zelenskyy told a joint press conference with von der Leyen that Ukraine planned to use a proposed multi-billion dollar European Union loan for air defence, energy and domestic weapons purchases.
Key events
The EU will grant a loan of up to 35 billion euros ($39.06bn) to Ukraine to help the country stuck in a grinding war with Russia, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced on Friday.
The loan, which was announced while the bloc’s Commission chief is on a visit to Kyiv, is part of a wider plan among G7 nations to raise funds using proceeds from Russian assets frozen to sanction the country for invading its neighbour.
“Relentless Russian attacks means Ukraine needs continued EU support,” von der Leyen said in a post on X.
Ukraine is facing huge financial needs after more than two years of intensive warfare that have devastated its infrastructure.
The Kremlin said on Friday that Russia’s forces would restore control of its Kursk region “in a timely manner”, declining to say how soon this could be achieved.
Ukraine launched the biggest foreign attack on Russia since the second world war, bursting through the border into the western Kursk region supported by swarms of drones and heavy weaponry, including western-made arms.
Russia has been fighting since then to expel the Ukrainian forces, Reuters reported. On Thursday, a senior Russian commander said Russian troops had recaptured two villages in the Kursk region.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov added on Friday that Russian authorities did not doubt that its forces would return control over the region, though the situation there was “extreme”.
Russia said on Friday that the West should stop supplying weapons to Ukraine and sponsoring “terrorist activity” if it wanted to send a signal it was serious about seeking an end to the war.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters that a peace plan put forward by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had nothing to do with settling the conflict.
Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Ukraine had completed preparation of a “Victory Plan” that he intends to discuss with President Joe Biden when he visits the United States next week.
Ukraine’s forces destroyed 61 out of 70 Russian attack drones and one out of four missiles launched overnight, Ukraine’s air force said on Friday.
“The air defence system operated in Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Sumy, Poltava, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Khmelnytsky, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Kherson regions,” it said on the Telegram messenger.
The United States should take into account Moscow’s warnings on risks of further escalation around the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti cited Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Friday.
Commenting on the possibility of a meeting between Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and US state secretary Antony Blinken on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he said there will not be any meeting as the sides have “nothing to talk about”.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said separately that giving carte blanche for Kyiv to carry out long-range strikes deep inside Russia would change the nature of the conflict in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
“We would like to remind the hawks on both sides of the Atlantic … They are playing with fire and have lost all sense of reality,” she told a briefing.
“The scale of conflict which started because of the West risks becoming completely different, which could bring dangerous consequences for the whole world.”
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday she had arrived in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv to discuss Europe’s support, winter preparedness, defence and progress on the G7 loans.
“My 8th visit to Kyiv comes as the heating season starts soon, and Russia keeps targeting energy infrastructure,” von der Leyen said on the X social network.
Von der Leyen said on Thursday that the sum of 160 million euros from the proceeds of frozen Russian assets would be allocated to meet Ukraine’s urgent humanitarian needs for this winter, Reuters reported.
Russia has knocked out about 9 gigawatts (GW) of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which von der Leyen said was the “power equivalent of the three Baltic states”.
She also said that the EU aimed to restore 2.5 GW of power generating capacity and would increase exports to supply 2 GW of electricity to Ukraine.
Von der Leyen will meet Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other officials.
Italy is about to send another Samp-T anti-missile system to Ukraine, foreign minister Antonio Tajani said on Thursday, underlining the need, however, to avoid entering war with Russia.
“We are sending a new Samp-T (anti-missile system) to protect hospitals, schools, universities … for this country that was attacked by Russia,” Tajani told Radio 24.
He added that “defending Ukraine does not mean bringing a world war … We are helping Ukraine and must reach a fair peace”.
Hello and welcome to the Ukraine live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and the time in Kyiv is 10.15am.
We start with news that Russia’s military command had anticipated Ukraine’s incursion into its Kursk region and had been making plans to prevent it for several months, according to a cache of documents that the Ukrainian army said it had seized from abandoned Russian positions in the region.
The disclosure makes the disarray among Russian forces after Ukraine’s attack in early August all the more embarrassing. The documents, shared with the Guardian, also reveal Russian concerns about morale in the ranks in Kursk, which intensified after the suicide of a soldier at the front who had reportedly been in a “prolonged state of depression due to his service in the Russian army”.
Unit commanders are given instructions to ensure soldiers consume Russian state media daily to maintain their “psychological condition”.
In other news:
Ukraine’s offensive into the Russian border region of Kursk diverted about 40,000 Russian troops away from the frontline, Zelenskyy said on Thursday. Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on 6 August in a bid to pull Moscow’s forces away from eastern Ukraine, where the Russian army has captured a string of villages in recent months.
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had captured the village of Heorhiivka, east of the city of Kurakhove, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in an afternoon report, referred to the village as one of several engulfed by fighting. Popular Ukrainian military blog DeepState said the village was in Russian hands. In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s forces had “managed to diminish the occupiers’ assault potential in Donetsk region,” though the situation remained difficult in areas subjected to the heaviest attacks, near Kurakhove and another key Russian target, the city of Pokrovsk.
Russian forces hit a geriatric care home in the Ukrainian city of Sumy and targeted its energy sector in a new wave of airstrikes on Thursday, killing at least one civilian, Ukrainian officials said. During a daytime strike on the northern city, a Russian guided bomb hit a five-storey building, regional and military officials said. One person was killed and 12 wounded, the interior ministry said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said rescue teams were checking to see whether people were trapped under rubble. Images from the site shared alongside the ministry’s post showed elderly patients evacuated from the damaged building lying on the ground on carpets and blankets.
The UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said attacks on the power grid probably violated humanitarian law while the International Energy Agency said in a report that Ukraine’s electricity supply shortfall in the critical winter months could reach about a third of expected peak demand. Moscow has repeatedly attacked the Sumy region, which borders Russia’s Kursk region, the site of a major Ukrainian incursion in which Kyiv says it seized over 100 settlements.
Zelenskyy will meet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the White House next week in what is likely to be his last such visit before US elections that could upend Washington’s policy on Kyiv. Zelenskyy is expected to share a “victory plan” with the US leaders to end the war with Russia during the visit on 26 September – as Kyiv frets that a second Donald Trump presidency could loosen US commitment to Ukraine. In a separate announcement, Zelenskyy said he would also meet Trump.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful leader of Russia’s Chechen Republic, accused Elon Musk on Thursday of disabling a Tesla Cybertruck that he claimed to have received from the billionaire last month. Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya with an iron fist for over 17 years, shared a video in August of him driving around in the electric vehicle with what appeared to be a machine gun mounted on its roof. Kadyrov said he received the vehicle from Musk, a claim that the Tesla owner called a lie on his social media platform, X. “Now, recently, Musk remotely disabled the Cybertruck,” said Kadyrov in a post on his Telegram account. It was not possible to independently verify Kadyrov’s claims.
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