WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Russia says forces capture two settlements, Ukraine says fighting continues throughout front

Russia's Defence Ministry said on Thursday that its forces seized two more settlements in their drive through eastern Ukraine, but Kyiv made no such acknowledgement and its top commander said battles raged over 1,100 km of the front line.

The frontline fighting continued as direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators appeared set to get underway in Turkey.

The talks will be the first direct discussions between the sides since March 2022, but hopes of a breakthrough were limited as Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin ignored a call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to meet.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said there would be no progress towards peace without a meeting between himself and Putin.

A Russian Defence Ministry statement said Moscow's forces had seized Novooleksandrivka, a village near Pokrovsk, a logistics hub that Moscow has targeted for months without capturing it.

The ministry said its forces had also taken Torske, further northeast and near two other cities Moscow would like to capture in the longer term -- Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

The General Staff of Ukraine's military, in a late evening report, listed Novooleksandrivka as one of more than dozen settlements which it said had come under Russian attack.

The General Staff made no mention of Torske, but the popular blog DeepState said Russian forces had tried to seize the settlement but had been repelled.

Reuters could not independently confirm battlefield reports from either side. Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, currently holds about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine's top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Kyiv wanted a "just peace", but continued to face "active combat continuing on a stretch of the front extending about 1,100 km (680 miles)".

Describing on Telegram his presentation to a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council, Syrskyi said Russia "has turned its aggression against Ukraine into a war of attrition and is using a combined force of up to 640,000 troops."

After an initial unsuccessful drive on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in the first weeks of the invasion, Russian forces focused their efforts on the Donbas in the east, made up of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

They have been capturing village after village for several months, but Ukrainian forces have achieved some successes in holding back the advance, particularly around Pokrovsk.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky seeks to make a “political show” out of the expected peace talks with Russia in Istanbul, even if it means disrupting the negotiations, former Ukrainian diplomat Andrey Telizhenko has told RT.

Russian chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said he would be waiting for the Ukrainian team starting at 10 a.m. local time on Friday, for the first direct talks since 2022. During a visit to Ankara on Thursday, Zelensky criticized what he described as the “low-level” composition of the Russian delegation, but nevertheless promised to dispatch his own negotiators to Istanbul.

Telizhenko told RT that Zelensky has been relying on France and the UK for weapons and financial aid because he “does not listen to Washington anymore.” If the Ukrainian leader secures more support from the West, he “may agree and move forward with the negotiations, or he may sabotage them,” the ex-diplomat said, expressing doubts that real talks could “ever happen.”

“This is just a political show, not diplomacy,” he said. “Zelensky is not thinking about Ukrainians. He is trying to play this game for himself,”Telizhenko argued.

Russian and Ukrainian delegations were initially expected to meet in Istanbul on Thursday after President Vladimir Putin proposed resuming direct talks without any preconditions. According to Moscow, the negotiations should resume from the process that was interrupted in the spring of 2022, when Ukraine abruptly walked away from the table.

Zelensky initially ruled out any negotiations with Moscow unless Russia agreed to a 30-day ceasefire. Moscow has argued that Kiev would use such a truce to rearm and regroup its forces. Putin has said that, for a lasting ceasefire, Ukraine must halt its mobilization campaign and stop receiving weapons from abroad.

Reuters/RT