Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has met his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in Paris to bolster support for Kyiv, as Ukrainian and European defence chiefs gathered in Brussels for talks centred around Ukrainian and collective security.
The meetings came on Monday amid a diplomatic flurry of activity to end Russia’s almost four-year-old war in Ukraine.
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Before the meeting, Macron’s office said the two presidents would discuss the conditions necessary for a “fair and lasting peace”.
Speaking to La Tribune Dimanche newspaper on Sunday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the meeting aimed “to move the negotiations forward”.
“Peace is within reach, if [Russian President] Vladimir Putin abandons his delusional hope of reconstituting the Soviet empire by first subjugating Ukraine,” he noted.
EU ministers
Reporting from Brussels, where a meeting of the European Union’s defence ministers, also attended by Ukraine’s Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal, took place on Monday, Al Jazeera’s Hashem Alhelbarra said Kyiv’s European allies wanted to see “an agreement where there’s no notion of part of Ukraine being handed over to Russia as the price they have to pay for a permanent deal”.
Alhelbarra added that the bloc is worried about the possibility of a “blanket amnesty”, which would prevent Russian officials from being tried over crimes committed in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy said on social media that he had briefed Finland’s President Alexander Stubb on “the signals we have received from the American side”, following a day of talks on Sunday between Ukrainian and American negotiators in Florida.
The Ukrainian leader also confirmed that he had spoken to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO boss Mark Rutte, saying “these are important days, and much can change”.
Zelenskyy has described talks in the United States on Sunday between US and Ukrainian negotiators as “very constructive”, but noted that there were “some tough issues that still have to be worked through”.
For Kyiv, it marks progress from US President Donald Trump’s original 28-point peace proposal, which it and its European allies viewed as favourable to Russia.
On Sunday, the US president declared on Air Force One that “there’s a good chance we can make a deal”.
However, he also said Ukraine has “some difficult little problems”. Two days earlier, Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and Ukraine’s top negotiator, resigned amid a corruption scandal in the energy sector.
More work needed
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, hailed the Florida talks as a success, but added that “there’s more work to be done”.
“There are a lot of moving parts, and obviously there’s another party involved here that will have to be a part of the equation, and that will continue later this week when Mr Witkoff travels to Moscow,” he said.
Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands said the Ukrainians would be happy that Rubio, whom they see as the Trump administration’s most Ukraine-friendly senior official, was currently leading the negotiations.
“Because Rubio seems to be driving the car at the moment, things seem to be going OK for the Ukrainians,” Challands said.
However, he stressed that caution was needed because of Trump’s unpredictability and because Russia had yet to react to the latest peace plan draft.
Sticking to his maximalist demands, Putin has said he will end the war only when Ukrainian troops withdraw from four of its regions Russia illegally annexed in 2022 but does not fully control.
“If they don’t withdraw, we’ll achieve this by force. That’s all,” the Russian president said last week.
US envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, will discuss the latest draft peace agreement with Putin when they meet in the Russian capital on Tuesday afternoon.
Russians are generally not enthusiastic about their visit, Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova said, reporting from Moscow.
“On the one hand, polls show that most Russians really want an end to the conflict as soon as possible,” Shapovalova said. “On the other, there’s not much enthusiasm about Steve Witkoff’s visit,” she added.
Over on the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said on Monday that its troops had seized the settlement of Klynove in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The announcement could not be independently confirmed.
Deadly attack on Dnipro
Elsewhere, at least four people were killed and 40 others injured, 11 critically, in a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Monday, according to Vladyslav Gaivanenko, the acting governor of Dnipropetrovsk region.
The strike damaged four residential high-rises and an educational facility in the city centre, Dnipro’s Mayor Borys Filatov said. He also reported that search and rescue operations were ongoing.
Russia launched 89 strike and decoy drones overnight on Sunday before the Dnipro attack, with 63 of those shot down or jammed, Ukraine said.
The Russian Defence Ministry said it had downed 32 Ukrainian drones overnight across 11 of the country’s regions as well as the Sea of Azov.
