Ukrainian forces have recaptured a village on the frontline in the country’s east, amid signs Russia’s advance may be slowing down and as Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed his call for the fighting to end “with a just and lasting peace”.
On Sunday, Ukrainian forces took back the village of Pischane, south-west of the city of Pokrovsk, military officials said. Russian units had made rapid gains in the area in December and January, seizing a string of settlements and threatening to cut off Pokrovsk.
Since early this month, the Russians’ progress has stalled. Russian bloggers say Ukrainian drones dominate the skies and have been methodically destroying armoured vehicles. Russian troops have to walk 10km on foot, with many not arriving alive, they say.
The high rate of Russian casualties has had a demoralising effect on forward combat units. Snowy conditions and a lack of tree cover has made it easier for Ukrainian defenders to pick off infantry soldiers before they reached the contact line, they add.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskyy confirmed that the situation in the Pokrovsk direction had recently improved. The village’s recapture bolsters Kyiv’s argument that Moscow’s victory is not inevitable and that with sufficient western support it can claw back territory. Ukrainian platoons have also counterattacked around the neighbouring village of Kotlyne.
Russian advances have been made at a vast human cost. According to Maj Viktor Trehubov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s ground forces in the east, 7,000 Russian soldiers died in January in the battle for Pokrovsk, and 15,000 are wounded or missing.
Zelenskyy said in Munich that the Kremlin was ready to expand its war in Ukraine and to attack Nato. In an interview with the broadcaster NBC, he said Vladimir Putin would take advantage of a weakened alliance should the US pull its military out of Europe.
“We believe that Putin will wage war against Nato,” Zelenskyy predicted. He said the Russian president should not be trusted under any circumstances, but emphasised that Donald Trump still had leverage to push him into negotiations.
Zelenskyy suggested Putin did not want a genuine peace deal and instead required war “to keep his grip on power”. He said over the previous week Russia had hit Ukraine with nearly 1,220 aerial bombs and more than 850 attack drones, as well as 40 other missiles.
“Ukraine is defending … but we need more air defence systems to protect Ukrainians’ lives. Europe and the world must be better protected from such evil and prepared to confront it,” he wrote on social media on Sunday.
He added: “This requires a strong, united foreign policy and pressure on Putin, who started this war and is now expanding it globally. Together with Europe, the US and all our partners, we can end this war with a just and lasting peace.”
Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, confirmed Zelenskyy’s statement during the weekend that Ukraine had been kept in the dark over negotiations about a summit between Putin and Trump. “I saw that someone said that there would be a meeting in Saudi Arabia. I do not know what it is,” Zelenskyy said on Saturday.
Russia and the US are due to send high-level delegations for talks this week in Saudi Arabia. European countries will meet on Monday in Paris to discuss Trump’s apparent plan to carve up Ukraine, with Russia keeping its battlefield gains, in an emergency summit hosted by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskyy’s office, said Ukraine would not take part in the US-Russia meeting in Riyadh. “There is nothing on the negotiating table that would be worth discussing,” he told Ukrainian TV, stressing: “Russia is not ready for negotiations.”
On Sunday, Zelenskyy arrived in the United Arab Emirates, saying his top priority was to ensure “that still more of our people are able to return home from captivity”. He also said investment would be discussed.
The UAE has played a key role in overseeing the return home of Ukrainians deported to Russia during the nearly three-year-old war, many of them children.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, continued its winter bombing campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Late on Saturday several Shahed drones smashed into a thermal power plant in the southern city of Mykolaiv. The attack followed a Russian strike on the Chornobyl nuclear power station’s concrete shelter.
According to Mykolaiv’s mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych, the plant was badly damaged. “This was done deliberately to leave people without heat at sub-zero temperatures and create a humanitarian catastrophe,” he wrote on Telegram. More than 100,000 people are without heating.
