Putin says western troops in Ukraine would be ‘legitimate targets’ as he repeats offer to host talks in Moscow
Russian president Vladimir Putin appeared to be unfazed by the proposals, telling an economic forum in Vladivostok instead that any western troops in Ukraine would be considered “legitimate targets for destruction.”
“If some troops appear there, especially now during the fighting, we proceed from the premise that they will be legitimate targets,” Putin said.
Moscow has long rejected any suggestion of foreign troops in Ukraine, stressing it would be unacceptable and pose a threat to its national security.
Putin further argued that “if decisions are reached that lead to peace, to long-term peace, then I simply do not see any sense in their presence on the territory of Ukraine, full stop,” as he insisted Russia would “comply” with any agreement reached “in full.”
The Russian president also repeated his – already rejected – offer to host future peace talks in Moscow, claiming he would “definitely provide working conditions and security.”
(It’s not impossible to see why Zelenskyy wouldn’t necessarily trust any of that given the history between the two countries.)
Putin also appeared to reject a suggestion of holding that meeting elsewhere.
“But if they tell us: ’we want to meet with you, but you have to go somewhere else for this meeting’, it seems to me that these are simply excessive requests on us,” he said.
Key events
In a short summary after the meeting, Ukraine’s Zelenskyy said the pair talked about yesterday’s call between the Coalition of the Willing and US president Donald Trump, and potential ways of advancing peace talks with Russia.
In return, Slovakia’s Fico briefed him on his conversations with Putin and Xi in China, Zelenskyy said.
“A separate and important topic was Europe’s energy independence – Russian oil, just as Russian gas, has no future,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian president also said that Fico backed Ukraine’s ambitions to join the European Union, as the formal process currently remains blocked by Hungary.
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy meets Slovakia’s Fico for talks on Russian war, energy
After meeting the European Council’s António Costa earlier, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been taking parts in talks with Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico.
The pair was often at odds in recent years, particularly over relations with Russia, with Fico repeatedly engaging and meeting in person with Vladimir Putin and energy as Slovakia continues to heavily rely on Russian energy imports.
Fico met with Putin in China earlier this week, calling for “standardisation” of relations with Russia, including better economic relations; an isolated view within the European Union.
In first reaction from the meeting, Zelenskyy reportedly told Ukrinform agency that the talks were “substantive.”
The pair was expected to take part in a press conference, so I will look out for any news lines that come out of it when it happens.
France puts money into ‘Nostradamus’ to help with its early defence warning systems
France’s defence ministry is boosting investment in a 1990s radar system, as part of Paris’s push to bolster its early warning defences and curb Europe’s reliance on the United States, after politicians admitted the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza “gave them a lot to think about.”
The Nostradamus system, developed in 1995, is Europe’s only “over-the-horizon” radar which can see as far as Moscow, AFP reported. Developed in 1995, it was later sidelined, but is now making its unusual comeback.
The system can track both hypersonic missiles, like those fired from Iran, and slow-moving objects at high altitude, such as the Chinese balloon shot down over the United States in February 2023.
AFP noted that president Emmanuel Macron, who has long urged greater European sovereignty, called in July for a 3.5-billion-euro ($4-billion) spending boost.
Of that, funding for Nostradamus is earmarked for an initial two million euros, with a further 50 million euros set to follow.
The aim is to bring Nostradamus to full capacity by mid-2028 by linking it to the air operations command system, said air force chief of staff general Jerome Bellanger.
A Council of Europe delegation denounced the arrest of a Turkish human rights and LGBTQ+ activist who was detained after delivering a speech critical of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government at a session of Europe’s leading human rights body.
Enes Hocaogullari was arrested last month after he criticised the detention of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu and other opposition figures. The 23-year-old activist also spoke out against alleged police violence during protests that erupted following Imamoglu’s arrest.
Marc Cools, president of a delegation of the Council of Europe’s local and regional authorities congress, said there was no legal justification for Hocaogullari’s prosecution or detention. “Silencing Enes is silencing youth – and silencing youth is silencing democracy itself,” Cools said after visiting Hocaogullari in prison and meeting a day earlier with Turkey’s deputy justice minister and other officials in Ankara.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that Europe can catch up in the global artificial intelligence race as he inaugurated the continent’s fastest supercomputer, AFP reports.
“We in Germany, and we in Europe, have every opportunity to catch up and then keep pace” with the US and China, he said at the inauguration of the Jupiter computer which will be able to perform at least one quintillion (or one billion billion) calculations per second.
The US Department of Defense informed European countries last week that military support under a program known as Section 333 will be cut to zero from the next fiscal year, a Lithuanian defence ministry official said, Reuters reports.
Two sources familiar with the matter said the US will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, raising concerns among key recipients such as Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia – former Soviet republics now in NATO and the European Union.
Section 333 is an authority under which the US provides training and equipment to enhance the security of partner states.
US president Donald Trump’s trade deals will stay in place despite an ongoing legal challenge to his sweeping tariffs, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC in an interview.
“These big deals are going to stay. We have lots of other authorities that the president can use,” Lutnick said. “The 232s – so everything we just did with Japan – that holds, right? That’s durable, that stays. Europe – that stays. These are autos, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, those all stay.”
The EU reached a deal with the US over the summer for 15% tariffs to be imposed on European exports, while some EU tariffs on US goods would be scrapped. The deal avoided threatened Trump tariffs of 30%, but many financial institutions remarked on what they believe is an “asymmetrical deal” that favours the US.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman, Georgiy Tykhy, has slammed Vladimir Putin’s rejection of a foreign peacekeeping force in Ukraine. Speaking earlier today, Putin said Russia would consider western troops in Ukraine to be “legitimate targets”.
“He’s not the one to decide,” Tykhy said. “Putin has made a mistake by deciding that he can place his troops across the border in Ukraine, and now it is none of his business whom Ukraine invites to its territory to protect its security,” he said at a briefing in response to a question by AFP.
The German government plans to seek parliamentary approval for some 80 defence projects by the end of the year, Reuters reports, including for the purchase of additional Eurofighter jets and Patriot and Iris-T SLM missiles, a document showed.
The document lists 81 defence projects that surpass the threshold of €25m (£21.5m), beyond which the purchases need to be approved by parliament’s budget committee.
The list includes the so-called tranche 5 of Eurofighter jets, which according to the former chancellor Olaf Scholz was meant to comprise 20 aircraft, as well as Puma infantry fighting vehicles, Boxer armoured personnel carriers and many other weapons.
An Italian teenager nicknamed “God’s influencer” for his efforts to spread the Catholic faith online will become the first millennial saint on Sunday at a canonisation attended by thousands of pilgrims, AFP reports.
Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia in 2006 aged 15, will be raised to sainthood by Pope Leo XIV in a ceremony in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
The teenager’s body, dressed in jeans and a pair of Nike trainers, lies in a glass-walled tomb in Assisi, visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year.
His canonisation, initially set for April but postponed when Pope Francis died, will be watched by faithful on giant screens in Assisi, a medieval city and pilgrimage site in the central region of Umbria.
‘Thousands’ of troops could be deployed as part of guarantees for Ukraine, Zelenskyy says
Speaking at the same press conference, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “thousands” of western troops could be deployed as part of security guarantees in a peace deal to end the war with Russia, AFP reported.
“It will definitely not be single digits, but in the thousands. And that is a fact, but it is still a little too early to talk about it,” he said.
EU officials to travel to Washington for talks on sanctions, EU’s Costa says
A delegation of EU officials will travel to Washington to work with the US on further sanctions on Russia, European Council president António Costa said at a joint press conference with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv.
He said:
“We demonstrated that the coalition is not only willing, but it’s able to deliver; in the nutshell we are ready for the day after [the ceasefire/peace deal is agreed].
But for that day to come, we must push Putin to the negotiating table. …
Only more pressure can change this course, and we are ready to do more. We are working with United States and other like minded partners to increase our pressure through further sanctions – direct sanctions and secondary sanctions, more economic measures to push Russia to stop this war, to stop killing people, to stop this threat in Ukraine.
The work is starting in Brussels on the new sanctions package, and a European team is travelling to Washington DC to work with our American friends.”
The European Commission is briefing the media now, answering questions about the commission president’s Ursula von der Leyen participation in yesterday’s meeting of the Coalition of the Willing and her separate phone call with US vice-president JD Vance.
Commission chief spokesperson Paula Pinho says they discussed sanctions, as she argued:
“We’ve been seeing that the sanctions are effective, and we will continue, therefore, to put pressure on Russia’s war economy, increase the cost for Russia for not engaging in peace talks, and to eventually bring president Putin to the negotiating table.”
Asked if there was a specific discussion on China, she added, somewhat cryptically:
“As you know, we are also looking into the circumvention of sanctions, and in this sense, we’ve also brought this subject up, notably when president von der Leyen was in China. This is something that is discussed, and it is part of the overall discussion when it comes to sanctions.”