Key events
Geng Shuang, China’s deputy representative to the UN, has called on Ukraine and Russia to start peace talks as soon as possible at the UN security council meeting.
“Weapons may end a war, but they cannot bring lasting peace. China calls on the parties to the conflict to demonstrate political will, come together, and start peace talks as soon as possible to achieve a ceasefire and halt military actions,” Shuang was quoted by the Kyiv Independent on Sunday as telling the meeting.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has said that Russia would enter peace talks if Ukraine dropped its Nato ambitions and withdrew its forces from four Ukrainian regions claimed by Moscow (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia). Kyiv has repeatedly said its territorial integrity is non-negotiable.
Organisers of the peace summit played down China’s decision not to attend, a move that prompted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to accuse Beijing of helping Moscow undermine the meeting, which China’s foreign ministry denied.
Kyiv had been pushing hard for a Chinese delegation to attend the summit to give the conference further legitimacy and drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, writes the Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll (you can read more here).
Without China, hopes of isolating Moscow have faded, while recent military reverses have put Kyiv on the back foot.
China had said it would consider taking part in the event in Switzerland, but ultimately declined because Russia would not be there.
“It’s clear that at the moment, in geopolitical terms, for China the special relationship with Russia takes precedence over any other consideration,” Bernardino Regazzoni, a former Swiss ambassador to China, said.
China and Russia proclaimed a “no limits” partnership just days before Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Beijing says it is neutral in the conflict and has not supplied Moscow with weapons or ammunition.
90 states and organisations have registered to take part in the Ukraine peace summit on Saturday and Sunday in the alpine resort of Lucerne, which will seek to build support for Zelenskiy’s peace proposals, including the full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.
Putin’s peace plan ‘not serious’, Scholz says ahead of Ukraine summit in Switzerland
We are restarting our rolling coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Much of the focus will be around the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, the largest such event since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. We will bring you the latest updates throughout the day.
G7 leaders did not discuss Vladimir Putin’s proposals for peace in Ukraine since everyone knew they were not serious, Olaf Scholz said shortly before leaving for Switzerland, where a Ukraine conference opens on Saturday.
The German chancellor said Putin’s proposals – for Ukraine to abandon four provinces Russia claims, stop fighting and drop its ambition of Nato membership – were aimed only at distracting from the conference.
“Everyone knows that this was proposal wasn’t meant seriously, but had something to do with the peace conference in Switzerland,” he told ZDF television in an interview.
As world leaders gather for the summit, which Russia was not invited to, US vice-president Kamala Harris will stress that the outcome of the war affects the entire world and that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected, a US official has said.
Harris will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and is standing in for US President Joe Biden at the event. The president is returning to the US after attending the G7 in Italy to attend a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in Los Angeles.
The summit comes as G7 leaders clinched a new deal for a €50bn loan for Ukraine, securitised through use of the windfall profits from the interest on Russian central bank assets frozen by the EU and other western nations after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Here’s a summary of the day’s other main events:
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in Switzerland on Friday ahead of the two-day Ukraine peace summit. Zelenskiy said talks would focus on nuclear safety, food security, the return of prisoners of war and Ukrainian children taken to Russian-controlled territory.
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Kamala Harris, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the leaders of Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and Japan are among those set to attend the Swiss summit in Lucerne. Despite months of Ukrainian and Swiss lobbying, some others will not be there, most notably China. The gathering comes after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Moscow would only enter peace talks after Ukraine pulls its troops out of the east and south of the country – a plan which Zelenskiy has dismissed.
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On the ground in Ukraine, a Russian airstrike killed one person and injured at least four in the northern Sumy region on Friday, the military administration there said. The strike hit the town of Shostka, about 45km (28 miles) from the border with Russia, it said on Telegram, giving no details about damage. The strike came as Kyiv and Moscow staged dozens of drone and missile attacks overnight on Thursday and during Friday.
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Ukrainian attacks on southern Russia’s Belgorod region killed six people on Friday, officials said. Four bodies were pulled from the rubble of a multi-floor apartment building hit by Ukrainian shelling in the border town of Shebekino, Russia’s emergencies ministry said, adding after midnight that 50% of the rubble had been cleared. A Ukrainian drone struck a car in a village near Shebekino, killing the driver, said the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. He said a woman was killed in her home when it was struck by rocket fire in the village of Oktyabrsky, farther west.
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Russia launched 17 missiles and nearly 500 drones on Friday, Ukraine’s general staff said. Drone attacks killed a 54-year-old man in the southern Kherson region and injured a 17-year-old girl in the eastern city of Dnipro, regional authorities said. Three people were injured in a drone attack in the eastern Sumy region and several homes damaged in the neighbouring Kharkiv region.
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The EU has ramped up its production of projectiles and will match Russia’s production capacity next year, the bloc’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, told French news outlet La Tribune.
