Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz held a three-way telephone conversation with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Saturday, with the French and German leaders urging Putin to hold “direct serious negotiations” with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The call came as Russia’s assault on Ukraine’s Donbas region continues to grind on. During the 80-minute conversation, the two leaders “insisted on an immediate ceasefire and a withdrawal of Russian troops”, according to a readout from Scholz’s office.
Putin is unlikely to heed such calls. Instead, he warned Macron and Scholz that western weapons deliveries to Ukraine were “dangerous” and risked “further destabilisation of the situation”, according to a Kremlin readout.
Hopes for diplomacy have faded in recent weeks as Russia’s invasion reaches the three-month mark. Although Ukraine is taking heavy losses on the battlefield, there is a widespread belief in the country that agreeing to a negotiated settlement would simply give Russia time to regroup ahead of a further attack.
Russia’s army confirmed on Saturday that it now controls the strategic town of Lyman in eastern Ukraine, as Moscow’s assault on the Donbas region continues to grind on.
Lyman, a town of 20,000 people, lies on the road to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, two of the major Donbas population centres not yet under Russian control.
“The town of Krasny Liman has been entirely liberated from Ukrainian nationalists,” said Russia’s defence ministry in a statement, using the town’s old name.
Ukraine is on the back foot in Donbas, the industrial heartland of the country where Russia-backed forces already seized territory eight years ago and which has now become the centre of Moscow’s Ukraine invasion after the failed attempts to take the major cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
In his daily video address on Friday evening, Zelenskiy, said the Russians had “concentrated maximum artillery, maximum reserves in Donbas”, making life very difficult for the Ukrainian army.
Attention this week has been focused on the city of Sievierodonetsk, which if captured would give Russia control of the whole Luhansk region. The city has been under intense artillery and missile bombardment all week, and the Russians have taken control of the Myr hotel on the edge of town.
On Saturday morning, the Luhansk regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, said the Russians had so far not been able to advance any further than the hotel.
“We have not yet been able to get them out of there, despite their losses. But they are not able to move further either. Their tactics are always the same: a few hours of shelling, and then they try to advance,” he wrote.
Ukraine’s defence minister said foreign military deliveries were helping Ukrainian forces on the frontline, noting three systems that were now in active use against the Russians: M777 and FH70 howitzers as well as the Caesar self-propelled artillery. He also said American M109 howitzer systems had arrived in Ukraine.
“To imagine this back in March would have been impossible. But today it is a reality,” Oleksii Reznikov wrote on Facebook.
At the same time, Ukrainian officials continue to demand more weapons deliveries from the west, saying they risk being outgunned in Donbas and need the deliveries urgently.
There were reports in Washington that the Pentagon may be preparing to send Ukraine advanced long-range rocket systems to help their battle in the Donbas, something that the Ukrainian army and political leaders have been requesting for months.
Meanwhile, Russian forces also carried out a demonstrative test of a new hypersonic missile on Saturday. The Zircon missile, which was first tested in late 2020, was fired from a frigate in the Barents Sea and hit a target in the White Sea in the Arctic that was 625 miles away, said Russia’s defence ministry.
The Zircon can reach speeds of up to 10-times the speed of sound and flies at a low altitude, making it more difficult to intercept.
Also on Saturday, Ukraine’s former president Petro Poroshenko said he was barred from leaving the country, accusing Zelenskiy of breaking a “political ceasefire” in place since the start of the war. Poroshenko was due to travel to a Nato parliamentary assembly meeting in Vilnius.
Zelenskiy defeated Poroshenko in a 2019 election and before the start of the war prosecutors were investigating Poroshenko over his participation in an allegedly corrupt coal export scheme. Many observers suggested the charges were politically motivated.
After the outbreak of the war, Ukrainian authorities suspended the activities of a number of political parties with pro-Russian platforms, but others were allowed to continue, including Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party. Despite the longstanding acrimony between Zelenskiy and Poroshenko, both appeared to put their quarrels aside to focus on the threat from Russia.
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“There is a risk that by this decision, the authorities have broken the ‘political ceasefire’ in place during the war … which one of the pillars of national unity in the face of Russian aggression,” said Poroshenko’s office in a statement.
