The Ukrainian president has accused Vladimir Putin of “lying to everyone” about the situation in the Russian province of Kursk and seeking to prolong the war. In an X post on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia’s president was lying “about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region”. He said Ukrainian troops were still fending off Russian and North Korean forces in the area but face a potential new attack on Sumy in Ukraine’s north-east. He said Kyiv’s troops were not encircled in Kursk, as has been claimed by Russia, but that Moscow was accumulating forces nearby for a separate strike. “The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy,” he said. “It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war.”
Russian troops recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in the Kursk region, the Moscow’s defence ministry said on Saturday. On Thursday, Russia announced it had regained full control of the town of Sudzha as Ukraine’s forces have been forced to retreat.
In the X post, Zelenskyy also accused Putin of lying “about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated” and warned Russia’s leader will keep “dragging” out the war. “We talked about who would delay peace and slow everything down – and now we see it clearly,” Zelenskyy said. “A ceasefire could have already happened, but Russia is doing everything to prevent it.”
The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”. Starmer held a virtual call with other European leaders and allies, including Zelenskyy, on Saturday, where he said a “coalition of the willing” would help secure Ukraine “on the land, at sea and in the sky” in the event of a peace deal with Russia.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had successfully used a new domestically produced long-range missile in combat. The new “long Neptune” missile has a range of 1,000km (621 miles), he said in the X post. “A new Ukrainian missile, precise strike,” he said.
Zelenskyy said Russia wanted to achieve a “stronger position” militarily before committing to any ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. At a press conference in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said the question of territory in Ukraine’s war with Russia was “complicated” and should be discussed in detail at a later date.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, echoed Zelenskyy, saying Putin is “escalating the fighting” and “wants to get everything, then negotiate”. Russia “does not give the impression it sincerely wants peace”, Macron said in the statement provided to AFP on Saturday and urged Europe and the United States to put pressure on Russia to accept a proposed ceasefire.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke on Saturday to discuss the next stage in talks on ending the war. According to the state department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, the top diplomats “agreed to continue working towards restoring communication between the United States and Russia”. The statement gave no details on when the next round of US-Russia talks, which are being hosted by Saudi Arabia, would begin.
Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now an opponent of the Russian president, said Moscow was interested only in a conditional ceasefire. Kasyanov told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He rejected this proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, he wants conditional, he wants a ceasefire on his terms.”
Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night. Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.
Kyiv also said that the number injured in a Russian strike a day earlier on Zelenskyy’s home town, Kryvyi Rih, rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city. “Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.
Russia deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said. The governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime”. The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.
Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions. In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power.
