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The leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in London on Sunday to discuss putting pressure on Russia as it suffers military setbacks in the invasion of its neighbour, the French presidency said on Friday.
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French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will discuss with Zelenskyy the way forwards at a time when “Russia, in a state of military, economic and strategic failure, is persisting unsuccessfully with a deadly war,” the Élysée Palace said.
The meeting, which will get under way at Downing Street from around 5:30 pm, will also “take stock of the work undertaken in favour of a just and lasting peace in Ukraine and on the European continent”, the French presidency said.
Speaking at an EU-Western Balkans summit in Montenegro, Macron also said that the next meeting of Coalition of the Willing members will take place in Paris on 13-14 July.
“We will meet President Zelenskyy in a few days to organise support within the Coalition of the Willing and structure it,” Macron said.
The Coalition of the Willing is an initiative spearheaded by France and the UK and brings together around 25 countries that have pledged to deploy a multinational force to Ukraine after a peace deal with Russia is signed.
The announcements by Macron come a day after Zelenskyy proposed a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin in an open letter to the Russian leader, saying he was ready for a “full ceasefire.”
Macron praise the move as a “good initiative” and it was also welcomed by the EU and Germany.
Overnight strikes, recaptured territory
Meanwhile, Russian air strikes on Ukraine overnight into Friday killed at least seven people.
An attack on a food processing plant near Kyiv claimed four lives. The strike on the town of Brovary targeted a factory producing dairy products for children.
“The enemy attacked a peaceful civilian food industry enterprise,” Kyiv region governor Mykola Kalashnyk said in a post on Telegram.
“Russia is demonstrating once again that its target is not military objectives, but ordinary people living and working on their own land,” he added.
There may be further victims trapped under the rubble.
Further strikes left three people dead, including a woman in the Zaporizhzhia region. Russian strikes in the Dnipropetrovsk region also killed two people, according to the regional governor, Oleksandr Ganzha.
Ukraine estimates that Russia fired 216 long-range drones and two missiles overnight. The Ukrainian military says it shot down 198 of them.
Ukraine recaptured more territory than it lost to Russian forces in May for the second straight month, an analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) carried out by the AFP news agency showed earlier this month.
Russia’s offensive has meanwhile led to rising prices, tax hikes, two-decade-high borrowing costs, business shutdowns and labour shortages, putting the economy in its trickiest spot since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Additional sources • AFP
