army secretary, Dan Driscoll<\/a> \u2013 Vance\u2019s friend and university classmate \u2013 was sent to Kyiv with a military delegation to brief Zelenskyy on its contents.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSince then, European governments have sought to revise the document, which appears to have originally been written in Russian. EU leaders attending an EU-Africa summit in Angola welcomed a degree of progress, but said far more work remained to be done and insisted Europe must be fully involved and Russia must be present if talks were to advance substantively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The European Council president, Ant\u00f3nio Costa, praised \u201ca new momentum\u201d, saying after talks on the sidelines of the summit that while issues remained, \u201cthe direction is positive\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, also called the \u201crefined peace framework\u201d agreed in Switzerland \u201ca solid basis for moving forward\u201d, but added: \u201cWork remains to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Von der Leyen said the core principles the EU would always insist on were that \u201cUkraine\u2019s territory and sovereignty must be respected \u2013 only Ukraine, as a sovereign country, can make decisions regarding its armed forces\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said both Europe and Russia must be fully involved. \u201cThe next step must be: Russia must come to the table,\u201d Merz said, while Europeans must be able to give their consent to \u201cissues that affect European interests and sovereignty\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Talks would be a \u201clong-lasting process\u201d and Merz said he did not expect a breakthrough this week. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said the talks were delicate because \u201cnobody wants to put off the Americans and President Trump from having the US on our side in this process\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tusk also stressed that any peace settlement needed to \u201cstrengthen, not weaken, our security\u201d and must not \u201cfavour the aggressor\u201d. Sweden\u2019s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said Russia \u201cmust be forced to the negotiating table\u201d to see \u201caggression \u2026 never pays\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, said there was more work to do but progress was being made. A group of countries supporting Ukraine \u2013 the coalition of the willing \u2013 would discuss the issue in a video call on Tuesday, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The chairs of the parliamentary foreign affairs committees of 20 European countries, including France, Ireland, Poland, Spain and the UK, issued a rare joint statement saying just and lasting peace would not be achieved by \u201cyielding to the aggressor\u201d but must be \u201cgrounded in international law and fully respect Ukraine\u2019s territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Monday, <\/strong>the White House pushed back against criticism, including from within the Republican party, that Trump is favouring Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cThe idea that the US is not engaging with both sides equally in this war to bring it to an end is a complete and total fallacy,\u201d the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zelenskyy is at his most vulnerable since the start of the war, after a corruption scandal led to two of his ministers being dismissed while Russia makes battlefield gains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ukraine\u2019s second largest city, Kharkiv, was hit by what officials said was a massive drone attack that killed four people on Sunday. With smoke rising from the rubble, one man was seen crouched and holding the hand of a dead person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere was a family, there were children,\u201d Ihor Klymenko, Red Cross commander of the emergency response team in Kharkiv, told Reuters. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how, but the children are alive, thank God, the man is alive. The woman died, unfortunately.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Across the border, Russian air defences downed Ukrainian drones en route to Moscow, forcing three airports serving the capital to pause flights. A reported Ukrainian drone strike on Sunday knocked power out for thousands of residents near Moscow, a rare reversal of Russian attacks on energy targets that regularly cause power blackouts for millions of Ukrainians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ukraine has significantly amended the US \u201cpeace plan\u201d to end the conflict, removing some of Russia\u2019s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly. Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":47812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11261,1648,7156,2567,11830,8217,5304,11394,4778,9204,5268,11583,1425,887,287,9331,10767,1384,6083,5241,351,5995,9506,10413,7445,5494,159,6621,9505,6564,3182,5455,11638,5345,5575,1445,8601,10954,6449,11348,8331,6086,9515,1152,5342,8029,10342,9974,9765,12899,12998,5572,9683,6864,5340,4802,8000,9237,5396,9126,837,3805,3174,71,5656,6944,3457,5217,12264,5655,12778,11179,4293,1898,11899,5818,1378,5348,146,12605,5180,5555,214,10976,6238,6348,1151,6555,8033,694,11255,10044,5251,2354,12790,6571,2982,5273,10415,594,7932],"class_list":["post-47811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-accused","tag-africa","tag-andriy","tag-angola","tag-armed-forces","tag-army","tag-attack","tag-attacks","tag-bless","tag-border","tag-british","tag-capital","tag-chancellor","tag-chief-of-staff","tag-children","tag-city","tag-conflict","tag-corruption","tag-dead","tag-died","tag-donald-tusk","tag-donbas","tag-drone","tag-drone-strike","tag-drones","tag-energy","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-commission","tag-european-council","tag-family","tag-forced","tag-foreign-minister","tag-france","tag-god","tag-independence","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-jd-vance","tag-keir-starmer","tag-kharkiv","tag-killed","tag-kremlin","tag-kyiv","tag-land","tag-law","tag-leadership","tag-leaked","tag-marco-rubio","tag-merz","tag-military","tag-millions","tag-ministers","tag-moscow","tag-nato","tag-negotiations","tag-nio","tag-peace","tag-peace-talks","tag-poland","tag-president","tag-prime-minister","tag-putin","tag-red-cross","tag-republican","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-scandal","tag-security","tag-seized","tag-smoke","tag-spain","tag-special-envoy","tag-steve-witkoff","tag-strike","tag-sweden","tag-switzerland","tag-truth","tag-uk","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian","tag-university","tag-ursula","tag-ursula-von-der-leyen","tag-us","tag-us-secretary-of-state","tag-veto","tag-video","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-volodymyr-zelenskyy","tag-von-der-leyen","tag-war","tag-washington","tag-weekend","tag-white","tag-white-house","tag-woman","tag-work","tag-who","tag-zelenskyy"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47813,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47811\/revisions\/47813"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}