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Zelensky says sustained Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy grid show Putin is not serious about ending the war
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Delegations from Ukraine and the US will continue their efforts to agree a peace deal at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, according to Kyiv‘s lead negotiator.
The two sides held talks over the weekend in Florida, with the US team led by Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Both Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky will be attending the Davos summit, which begins today, but the White House says there are currently no plans for a bilateral meeting.
Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov said talks would continue “at the team level during the next phase of consultations in Davos”.
Last night Zelensky said work continued to restore energy infrastructure devastated by targeted Russian strikes, and that such attacks showed Vladimir Putin had no interest in peace.
“If the Russians were seriously interested in ending the war, they would have focused on diplomacy,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address.
Russia is showing no signs of interest in talks leading to a peace deal and is instead focusing on boosting arms production, including a target of 1,000 drones a day, Ukraine’s top military commander has said.
“On the contrary, we see an increase in intensity of military actions, an increase in the number of offensive enemy groupings, an increase in production of strike weapons, missiles and drones,” General Oleksandr Syrskyi told the online media outlet lb.ua in an interview.
“At the moment, the enemy produces daily 404 ‘Shaheds’ (Iranian-designed drones) of different kinds. And the plans are to increase that. The enemy plans to boost production significantly, up to 1,000 drones a day,” he said.
Talks with US officials on a resolution of the nearly four-year-old war with Russia will continue at the World Economic Forum opening this week in the Swiss resort of Davos, Ukraine’s top negotiator Rustem Umerov said.
In a message on Telegram, Umerov said two days of talks in Florida with a US team including envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, president Donald Trump’s son-in-law, had focused on security guarantees and a post-war recovery plan for Ukraine.
He gave no indication whether any agreements had been achieved at the meeting.
“We agreed to continue work at the team level during the next phase of consultations in Davos,” Umerov said.
The two sides, in the latest of a series of meetings intended to work out the details of an agreement, had “discussed in depth” the two issues, “focusing on practical mechanisms and carrying out and implementing them,” Mr Umerov said.
He said his delegation had reported on Russian strikes last week which badly damaged Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and left hundreds of apartment buildings with no heating or electricity.
US president Donald Trump has claimed Denmark has not been able to do anything to get the “Russian threat” away from Greenland, and said, “Now it is time, and it will be done!!!”
“NATO has been telling Denmark, for 20 years, that “you have to get Russian threat away from Greenland,” he said.
“Unfortunately, Denmark has been unable to do anything about it,” Trump wrote in a post on the social media website TruthSocial.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he will settle for nothing less than ownership of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have insisted the island is not for sale and does not want to be part of the United States.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said a US invasion of Greenland “would make Putin the happiest man on earth”.
Sanchez said any military action by the US against Denmark’s vast Arctic island would damage Nato and “legitimise” the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“If we focus on Greenland, I have to say that a US invasion of that territory would make Vladimir Putin the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimise his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he told La Vanguardia.
“If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for Nato. Putin would be doubly happy,” he said.
President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to change tack over Greenland by vowing to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland.
More than 200,000 households in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region had no electricity on Sunday, according to the Kremlin-installed local governor.
In a Telegram post, Yevgeny Balitsky said nearly 400 settlements have had their supply cut, due to damage to power networks from Ukrainian drone strikes.
Russia has hammered Ukraine’s power grid, especially in winter, throughout the almost four-year war. It aims to weaken Ukrainians’ will to resist in a strategy that Kyiv officials call “weaponising winter.”
Meanwhile, Moscow has kept up its hammering of Ukraine’s energy grid in overnight attacks that killed at least two people, according to Ukrainian officials.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has accused Vladimir Putin of “heresy” after the Russian President claimed his invasion of Ukraine was a “holy mission”.
During a speech to mark Orthodox Christmas earlier this month, Putin called his soldiers “warriors” who were acting “as if at the Lord’s behest” and “defending the fatherland”.
Mr Williams, who served as the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, condemned the use of religion to justify the invasion as “disturbing” and said that Putin’s revanchism directly contradicts the message preached by Jesus Christ.
“I’d certainly say we’re talking about heresy,” he told The Independent. “We’re talking about something which undermines a really fundamental aspect of religious belief, of Christian belief, which assumes that we have to defend God by violence.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was important to outline the dire effects of the Russian strikes as they demonstrated that Russia was not interested in diplomacy.
“If the Russians were seriously interested in ending the war, they would have focused on diplomacy,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address.
He said Ukrainian intelligence had determined that Russia was conducting reconnaissance on key sites in preparation for strikes, including targets linked to Ukraine’s nuclear power stations.
Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said on Saturday that there was evidence Russia was considering attacks on power substations supplying nuclear power stations.
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