dpa
Kiev/Moscow
The day after Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington, the European Union invited the Ukrainian president on Thursday to come to Brussels.
Zelensky has been invited to come to Brussels in February, and an EU-Ukraine summit has been confirmed for February 3, according to a spokesperson for EU Council President Charles Michel.
According to the spokesperson, however, the heads of state and government of the 27 EU states will not participate. It is planned that the European Union will be represented by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Michel.
Zelensky travelled to Washington on Wednesday for his first trip abroad since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
For appearances on the world political stage - for example at the G7 summit in the Bavarian resort of Elmau - he has so far always been connected online from Ukraine.
Zelensky left Washington with a pledge of $1.85 billion in additional military assistance, including the Patriot air defence system.
Russia will target the Patriot system once it gets to Ukraine with a view to destroying it, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov has said in Moscow.
“Demilitarization is after all one of the goals of the special military operation,” Peskov said in remarks reported by Russia’s Interfax news agency. The US and other countries were supplying Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated weapons, he said. “This will not contribute to a rapid resolution of the situation - on the contrary.” Zelensky’s visit to Washington proved that neither Washington nor Kiev were prepared to listen to Moscow’s viewpoint. “And there have been no genuine calls for peace,” Peskov said.
Continuing arms supplies were prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people, and Russia had shown that its new hypersonic missiles were able to overcome any air defence, he added.
Russia has now lost more than 100,000 soldiers in its war in Ukraine, according to a claim by the general staff of Ukraine’s military.
Thursday’s statement by the Ukrainian military said that 100,400 Russian soldiers had been “eliminated.”
According to independent media, this may mean that they were killed or so seriously injured that they had to leave military service.
Russia had recently spoken of around 6,000 soldiers killed in its own ranks. Independent Russian media, meanwhile, have already identified more than 10,000 Russian casualties by name. Ukraine itself does not name its own casualties in its daily military reports. The presidential office in Kiev had recently spoken of more than 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed.
The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, says he was slightly injured by Ukrainian artillery fire while celebrating in Donetsk.
“I am injured, a 3 by 4-millimetre splinter entered above the right shoulder blade,” Rogozin wrote on his Telegram channel on Thursday.
According to the statement, he will need surgery.
According to media reports, the politician, known for his imperialist stance, was celebrating his birthday when the bullets hit a bar in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk.
In addition to the shoulder injury, Rogozin also received shrapnel in his face and buttocks, according to the report. Video footage of a partially destroyed restaurant was circulated on social networks in Russia.
Rogozin, whose political beginnings lie in the extreme right-wing party Rodina (Homeland) and who was photographed by the media giving the Hitler salute at a Russian nationalist march, later made a career under President Vladimir Putin - first as ambassador to NATO in Brussels, then as deputy prime minister and finally as head of the space agency Roscosmos.
Rogozin, meanwhile, has set up a group of volunteer military advisers under the name Tsar’s Wolves. On several occasions he has posed handing over equipment for soldiers on the front lines.
German defence contractor Rheinmetall is supplying military trucks to Ukraine on behalf of the German government, with a total of 26 brand-new HX 8x8 vehicles to be delivered.
The order is worth ?12.5 million ($13.3 million).
Delivery of the logistics vehicles has already begun.
The manufacturer is the joint venture Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles (RMMV), which has its headquarters in Munich. Rheinmetall holds a 51% stake in the company, MAN Truck & Bus 49%.
Russia says it largely agrees with the initiative by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to establish a safety zone around the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
Moscow and IAEA chief Rafael Grossi were very close in their positions on the safety zone, the Russian Federal Agency for Atomic Energy Rosatom announced after a meeting of various representatives from the Russian authorities with Grossi in Moscow.
During his visit to Moscow, Grossi is trying to ease the situation around the nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, which is occupied by Russian troops and has been repeatedly shelled during the war.
The IAEA chief’s initiative envisages Russia and Ukraine committing to cease firing on the nuclear facility. At the same time, Russia is to withdraw heavy weapons from the nuclear power plant in order to de-escalate the situation.
In Moscow, the Argentinian official negotiated with representatives of Rosatom, the technical supervisory authority, the Foreign Ministry and the Russian National Guard, which has units stationed at the nuclear power plant.
Grossi spoke afterwards of an important round of negotiations. “It’s key that the zone focuses solely on preventing a nuclear accident,” he tweeted.
