French President Emmanuel Macron hosted 20 European leaders at the Elysee Palace on Monday as a show of support for Ukraine, where the war with Russia is now in its third year.
“We are in the process of ensuring our collective security, for today and tomorrow,” Macron said at the hastily arranged gathering as Russia is ramping up its offensive.
“In recent months particularly, we have seen Russia getting tougher,” Macron said. “We also know that Russia is preparing new attacks, in particular to shock Ukrainian public opinion,” he said in opening remarks.
“Russia cannot and must not win that war,” Macron said at the meeting, which included German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Baltic leaders.
The French president said the European officials agreed that they should be prepared for a possible attack by Russia in the coming years and that more efforts were needed to help Ukraine financially and militarily.
“We all agree we don’t want to go to war with the Russian people, but we’re determined to keep escalation under control,” he said, adding that the meeting at the presidential palace was meant to see how those present could “do more in terms of military support and budget support.”
Addressing the leaders via video link, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy echoed Macron’s warning about an escalation of the conflict.
“We must ensure that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin cannot destroy our achievements and cannot expand his aggression to other nations,” he said.
Peace plan
The Kremlin said earlier Monday that Ukraine’s call for peace talks without Russia was ridiculous, a day after Zelenskyy expressed hope at a forum in Kyiv that a peace summit being planned by Switzerland will address Kyiv’s vision for ending the war.
Zelenskyy told reporters Sunday he hopes the peace summit will take place in spring. “We must not lose this diplomatic initiative,” he said. “We will offer a platform on which [Putin] can agree that he lost this war and that it was a mistake. A big mistake.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “We have repeatedly said that this is a strange format, to say the least, because certain peace plans are being implemented without the participation of Russia, which in itself is frivolous and even laughable.”
Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, has floated the possibility that Ukraine and its foreign partners could invite Russia to the future summit to discuss an end to Moscow’s invasion on Kyiv’s terms.
Zelenskyy’s peace formula calls for restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and a total withdrawal of Russian troops.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has experienced setbacks on the battlefield. Ukrainian troops pulled out of a village west of the recently occupied Russian city of Avdiivka in the east of the country, an army spokesman said Monday.
The latest setback for Kyiv’s soldiers was in the village of Lastochkyne. They retreated to nearby villages to hold the line there, Dmytro Lykhovii, a spokesman for one of the Ukrainian troop groupings, said Monday on national television.
Lykhovii said the Ukrainian troops were outnumbered and overwhelmed by Moscow’s military might, and Ukraine chose to pull them out of the village and mount a defense elsewhere.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said its troops had “liberated” Lastochkyne.
Russian forces pushed Ukrainian troops back by 10 kilometers and were continuing with their offensive, said Russian local commander Andrei Mordvichev, according to Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti, the Associated Press reports. Novosti said a key Ukrainian supply route ran through Lastochkyne.
AP was not able to independently verify these claims.
Ukraine’s military said Monday that Russian forces attacked the country overnight with 14 drones and six missiles.
Russian-installed officials in Russian-occupied Ukraine said on Monday that Moscow’s forces had for the first time destroyed a U.S.-supplied Abrams tank in Ukraine.
“From the very beginning, our soldiers said that these tanks would burn just like others,” state news agency RIA quoted Kremlin spokesman Peskov as saying in reference to previous instances where Russia says it has destroyed Western weaponry in Ukraine.
Reuters could not immediately verify a video published on social media that purported to show an Abrams tank on fire.
The United States began supplying the Abrams to Ukrainian forces last September.
Meanwhile, three civilians were killed and three others wounded on Monday when a Ukrainian drone attacked a car in Russia’s Belgorod region, bordering Ukraine, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
During the Sunday forum in Kyiv, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov underscored Russia’s military might and “air superiority” and complained that half of promised Western military support to Ukraine fails to arrive on time. That, he said, makes it hard to undertake proper military planning and ultimately costs the lives of soldiers.
Zelenskyy said Sunday that Ukraine’s victory in the war against invading Russian forces depends on support from the West, adding that he felt “positive” about the prospect of long-range missiles being supplied to Kyiv by its allies and partners.
Speaking at a news conference in Kyiv, Zelenskyy also said he was certain that the U.S. Congress would approve a major new batch of military and financial assistance but noted that Ukraine needed that decision to be made “within a month.”
Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.