Russia slams Western peacekeeping plan for Ukraine

Ukraine’s allies said they had agreed key security guarantees for Kyiv at a summit in Paris earlier this week – Copyright AFP Mykola SYNELNYKOV

Russia on Thursday slammed a plan for European peacekeepers to be deployed to Ukraine as “dangerous”, branding Kyiv and its allies an “axis of war” and dousing hopes it could be a step towards ending the almost four-year-long war.

US President Donald Trump has been pushing the warring sides to strike a deal to halt the conflict, running shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to try to get an agreement across the line.

An initial 28-point plan that largely adhered to Moscow’s demands was criticised by Kyiv and Europe. Now Russia has condemned attempts to beef up protections for Ukraine should an elusive deal be reached.

Ukraine’s allies said they had agreed key security guarantees for Kyiv at a summit in Paris earlier this week, including a peacekeeping force.  

But in its first comments since the summit, Moscow said the statements were far from anything the Kremlin could accept to end its assault.

“The new militarist declarations of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and the Kyiv regime together form a genuine ‘axis of war’,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

The plans drafted by Kyiv’s allies were “dangerous” and “destructive”, she added.

The remarks came as Russian strikes plunged hundreds of thousands in Ukraine into darkness and killed three in a frontline city — attacks that Zelensky said showed Russia was still set on war.

– Moscow rejects NATO presence –

European leaders and US envoys announced earlier this week that post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed once the fighting stops.

But Moscow has repeatedly warned that it would not accept any NATO members sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.

“All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian Armed Forces,” Zakharova said Thursday, repeating a threat previously uttered by Putin.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Thursday said a ceasefire in Ukraine was still “quite far” away given Russia’s position.

“The order must be: First a ceasefire, then security guarantees for Ukraine for a long-term agreement with Russia,” Merz told reporters.

“All of this is impossible without Russia’s consent, which we are probably still quite far from,” he added.

Zelensky said Thursday that a agreement between Kyiv and Washington for US security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalisation at the highest level with the President of the United States” following talks between envoys in Paris this week.

Kyiv says legally binding assurances that its allies would come to its defence are essential to convince Russia not to re-attack if a ceasefire is reached.

But specific details, including on the size of the European force and how it would engage, have not been made public.

Zelensky said earlier this week he was yet to receive an “unequivocal” answer from Kyiv’s partners of what steps they would take if Russia does attack again after a deal.

Zelensky has also said that the most difficult questions in any settlement — territorial control of the eastern Donbas region and the fate of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — were still unresolved.

– Russian strikes cut heating –

Ukraine was scrambling to restore heating and water to hundreds of thousands of households on Thursday after a new barrage targeted energy facilities in its Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

“This is truly a national level emergency,” Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipropetrovsk’s capital Dnipro, said on Telegram.

He announced power was “gradually returning to the hospitals” after blackouts had forced them to run on generators. The city authorities also extended school holidays for children.

About 500,000 households in the region remained cut off from power in Dnipropetrovsk, said Ukrainian energy company DTEK.

In a post on social media, Zelensky said the attacks “clearly don’t indicate that Moscow is reconsidering its priorities”.

A separate Russian attack on the southern city of Kherson killed three people, local officials said.

Russia’s army also claimed to have captured another village in the Dnipropetrovsk region as its grinding advance continued.