Russia’s invasion force closed in on the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk as its foreign ministry said it was not willing to make any concessions to end the war and blamed Kyiv’s troops for a drone strike on a vehicle used by United Nations monitors near the biggest nuclear power station in Europe.
Ukraine said Moscow’s military attacked the car driven by International Atomic Energy Agency staff near the occupied Zaporizhzhia atomic station, as rescue work ended in the ruins of a clinic in the region where eight people were killed and 22 injured by a Russian missile strike. No one was hurt in the incident involving the IAEA.
US president-elect Donald Trump says a top priority when he returns to power next month will be ending Europe’s biggest war in 80 years, but Moscow reiterated on Wednesday that it would not countenance peace unless Ukraine accepted the permanent loss of Crimea and four other provinces that are now partly occupied.
“If Washington really wanted to put an end to the conflict, they would immediately order their puppets in Kyiv to pull the Ukrainian armed forces back from their positions in Russia’s ... new regions,” said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. “Those who expect Russia to make concessions are either poorly informed or have a short memory.”
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Ukraine says it will never formally exchange its territory for peace but has suggested that it might consider a “freezing” of the frontline if it received watertight security guarantees and a clear timeline for Nato membership from its western allies.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, whose nationalist-populist stance has helped him maintain close ties to Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin, spoke to the Russian leader on Wednesday after meeting the incoming US president a day earlier.
“I had an hour-long phone conversation this morning with President Putin. These are the most dangerous weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war. We are taking every possible diplomatic step to argue in favour of a ceasefire and peace talks,” Mr Orban said.
In its account of the conversation, the Kremlin said that “the leaders conducted a detailed exchange of opinions on the Ukrainian issue. Viktor Orban expressed interest in facilitating a joint search for political and diplomatic solutions to the crisis, including in the context of his contacts with a number of western leaders”.
Mr Putin, meanwhile “set out his principled assessments of current developments around Ukraine and the destructive stance of the Kyiv regime, which continues to rule out the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict”.
Europe’s role in efforts to end the war will be discussed in Warsaw on Thursday, when Polish prime minister Donald Tusk hosts French president Emmanuel Macron. Polish media say the leaders could discuss the potential deployment of a European peacekeeping force to Ukraine in the event of a halt to fighting.
Ukrainian sources suggest Russian troops are now as little as 3km from Pokrovsk, which has been a hub for the defence of the eastern Donetsk region since fighting began there a decade ago. Almost all civilians have been evacuated from the small city, which has served as an important logistics centre for Kyiv’s forces in the area.
The IAEA condemned as “absolutely unacceptable” a drone strike on Tuesday that damaged one of its cars driving near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Kyiv and Moscow blamed each other for the incident.
Ukraine hit a heating plant in Russia’s Rostov region and an oil facility in the Bryansk region in the early hours of Wednesday, as it continues to develop and deploy its own long-range drones and missiles.
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