KYIV: President Vladimir Putin on Friday called on beleaguered Ukrainian troops in the Russian region of Kursk to \u201csurrender\u201d as Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused the Russian leader of seeking to sabotage a ceasefire initiative.
\nUS President Donald Trump urged Putin to spare the lives of the Ukrainian troops as he said his envoy had held \u201cproductive\u201d talks with Russia\u2019s leader on a proposed 30-day ceasefire.
\nRussia has mounted a rapid counteroffensive in the western border region of Kursk over the past week, recapturing much of the territory Ukraine seized in a shock incursion last August.
\nDefeat in Kursk would be a major blow to Ukraine\u2019s plans to use its hold on the region as a bargaining chip in peace talks for the three-year-old war.
\n\u201cWe are sympathetic to President Trump\u2019s call,\u201d Putin said in remarks broadcast on Russian television.
\n\u201cIf they lay down their arms and surrender, they will be guaranteed life and dignified treatment,\u201d Putin said.
\nTrump said \u201cthousands\u201d of Ukrainian troops were \u201ccompletely surrounded by the Russian military, and in a very bad and vulnerable position.\u201d
\n\u201cI have strongly requested to President Putin that their lives be spared. This would be a horrible massacre, one not seen since World War II,\u201d Trump said.
\nUkraine\u2019s military leadership denied the claims. \u201cThere is no threat of our units being encircled,\u201d Ukraine\u2019s General Staff posted on social media.
\nZelensky gave a more sober assessment in comments to reporters in Kyiv. \u201cThe situation in the Kursk region is obviously very difficult,\u201d he said, while insisting the campaign still had value.
\nRussia, he said, had been forced to pull troops from other areas on the front line, easing pressure on Ukrainian troops fighting to keep control of the eastern logistics hub of Pokrovsk.
\nTrump\u2019s latest comments came as he gave an update on a meeting Thursday between his envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin on a US-Ukrainian proposal for a 30-day pause in hostilities.
\n\u201cWe had very good and productive discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia yesterday, and there is a very good chance that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end,\u201d Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
\nPutin said Thursday that he had \u201cserious questions\u201d about the proposal and that events in Kursk would influence the next moves toward a ceasefire.
\nZelensky accused the Russian leader of seeking to undermine the ceasefire initiative.
\n\u201cHe is now doing everything he can to sabotage diplomacy by setting extremely difficult and unacceptable conditions right from the start even before a ceasefire,\u201d Zelensky posted on X.
\nThe Kremlin said Friday that it was \u201ccautiously optimistic\u201d a deal could be reached, but that Trump and Putin had to speak directly before talks could progress.
\nUS National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said in a Fox News interview that the United States had \u201csome cautious optimism\u201d after Witkoff\u2019s visit.
\nUS Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a meeting of the Group of Seven western powers in Canada that both sides would have to make \u201cconcessions.\u201d
\nG7 foreign ministers warned Russia of new sanctions unless it accepted a ceasefire \u201con equal terms,\u201d saying sanctions could include \u201ccaps on oil prices, as well as additional support for Ukraine, and other means.\u201d
\nFrance and Germany accused Russia of seeking to block a ceasefire, and support for Ukraine was to be discussed again in a video conference of some European leaders with Zelensky on Saturday.
\nDiplomatic sources said EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas would propose that the 27-country bloc supply up to 40 billion euros ($43.5 billion) in new military aid to Ukraine.
\nUkraine hoped its hold on Kursk would be a bargaining chips in talks with Russia and way eyeing a potential land swap with Moscow, which has occupied around a fifth of Ukraine since it took Crimea in 2014 and launched its military offensive in February 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KYIV: President Vladimir Putin on Friday called on beleaguered Ukrainian troops in the Russian region of Kursk to \u201csurrender\u201d as Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused the Russian leader of seeking to sabotage a ceasefire initiative. US President Donald Trump urged Putin to spare the lives of the Ukrainian troops as he said his envoy had …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78443,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78423\/revisions\/78443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}