Putin response to peace plan ‘not good enough’, says UK, as international militaries prepare to meet in London – as it happened | Ukraine

It is approaching 6pm in Kyiv and 7pm in Moscow. This blog will be closing shortly but you can find the Guardian’s latest Russia-Ukraine coverage here.

Here is a summary of the key headlines from today:

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday he had urged Kyiv’s western allies to give “a clear position” on security guarantees including about a potential foreign troop contingent on Ukrainian soil with a US backstop. His comments came after UK prime minister Keir Starmer held a virtual call with other European leaders and allies, including Zelenskyy, where Starmer 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.

• Starmer called for the “guns to fall silent in Ukraine” as he said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”. The UK prime minister said Vladimir Putin’s “yes, but” approach to a proposed ceasefire was not good enough, and the Russian president would have to negotiate “sooner or later”. Starmer also condemned Russia’s “barbaric attacks on Ukraine”.

• Starmer accused Putin of trying to delay peace, and said it must become a reality after more than three years of war. The UK prime minister was speaking at a press conference in Downing Street after a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing”. The meeting was addressed by Starmer, Zelenskyy, the French president, Emmanuel Macron and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte.

• Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Russia wanted to achieve a “stronger position” militarily before committing to any ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. “They want a stronger position before the ceasefire,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in Kyiv. At the same event, 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 Ukrainian president also accused Putin of “lying to everyone”. In a post on X on Saturday, Zelenskyy said Putin was lying “about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region, where our Ukrainian forces continue their operations” and “about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated”.

• Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey urged Starmer to seize frozen Russian assets to fund more support for Ukraine. Responding to Saturday morning’s meeting of the “coalition of the willing”, Davey said: “Putin could end this war today if he wanted peace, but it’s clear he’s only interested in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty and turning it into a vassal state of Russia.” Asked about whether he had discussed seizing Russian assets with his counterparts, Starmer said it had been discussed, but added it was “a complicated question”.

• Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now an opponent of the Russian president, said Moscow was only interested 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.”

• A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations. Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

• Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Kyiv’s forces were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and that they were not facing an encirclement. In a statement on social media, he added that the situation near the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk had stabilised but that Russian forces were accumulating across the border from Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy region. Earlier on Saturday, the Russian defence ministry said that its troops had recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in its western Kursk region.

• 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 Kryvy Rig 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.

• Akif Çağatay Kılıç, a foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that one of the main obstacles to a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia is a “loss of trust” between the two sides. He referred cryptically to a group of politicians, no longer in power, who he claimed scuppered the initial February 2022 talks in Istanbul, noting that the conditions under which Ukraine is able to negotiate now have changed.

• 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.