Ukraine president said work continued on proposal to put European forces on the ground; Nato chief Mark Rutte warns European leaders not to pre-empt peace process. What we know on day 1,030
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had held a new discussion with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, on the latter’s proposal to deploy troops in Ukraine as a means to help achieve a stable peace. “We share a common vision: reliable guarantees are essential for a peace that can truly be achieved,” said Ukraine’s president, who was in Brussels on Wednesday for meetings with Nato’s chief and European leaders. “We continued working on President Macron’s initiative regarding the presence of forces in Ukraine that could contribute to stabilising the path to peace.”
Macron’s office said France was making reinforced support for Ukraine its “absolute priority” and would continue giving Ukraine “the means to defend itself and to make Russia’s war of aggression fail”. Macron would maintain a “tight dialogue with Ukraine and its international partners to work for a return to a fair and lasting peace”. Zelenskyy is also due to take part in an EU summit in the Belgian capital on Thursday.
- At least 100 North Koreans deployed to support Russia’s war effort in Ukraine have been killed since entering combat in December, South Korean lawmaker Lee Seong-kweun told reporters on Thursday. Pyongyang has sent thousands of troops to reinforce the Russian military, including to the Kursk border region, where Ukrainian forces seized territory earlier this year. “In December, they [North Korean troops] engaged in actual combat, during which at least 100 fatalities occurred,” Lee said, speaking after a briefing by South Korea’s spy agency. “The National Intelligence Service also reported that the number of injured is expected to reach nearly 1,000.”
- Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, expressed frustration that European leaders were playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin by talking publicly about when peace talks might start and whether European peacekeepers would be involved. The focus, Rutte said, must be “to do everything now to make sure that when it comes to air defence, when it comes to other weapons systems, that we make sure that we provide whatever we can … I think we would be very wise to put some lid on this [pre-empting a peace process] and focus on the business at hand, and the business at hand is to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to prevent Putin from winning.”
Source: The Guardian
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