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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday he spoke for “nearly an hour” with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner about how to end the war with Russia.
“It was a very good conversation: we covered many details; there are good ideas that we discussed,” Zelensky said on the Telegram app. “We have new ideas in terms of formats, meetings and, of course, timing on how to bring a real peace agreement closer.”
Zelensky said Ukrainian Defense Minister Rusten Umerov would continue discussions with the U.S. team later Thursday, adding that there was still work to be done on “sensitive issues” and that the coming weeks could be “intensive.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday that Russia is seeing “slow but steady progress” in peace talks with the United States over Ukraine.
Zakharova said Western European powers were trying to “torpedo” progress and suggested the United States oppose such moves.
Ukraine strikes Russian oil and gas facilities
Ukrainian military and security officials said Thursday that Ukraine launched British Storm Shadow missiles and its domestically produced long-range drones to strike several Russian oil and gas facilities.
Ukraine has previously used British-made missiles to attack Russian industrial targets that it says are contributing to Moscow’s war.
Ukraine’s General Staff said the air force used Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in Russia’s Rostov region.
“Several explosions were recorded. The target was hit,” the general staff said in Telegram on Thursday.
He said the refinery was one of the largest suppliers of petroleum products in southern Russia and supplied diesel and jet fuel to Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s SBU security service said the locally-made long-range drones hit oil product tanks at the Russian port of Temryuk in the Krasnodar region and a gas processing plant in Orenburg in southwest Russia.
The Orenburg gas processing plant, the largest such facility in the world, is located approximately 1,400 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
WATCH | Zelensky on a demilitarized zone project:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented a 20-point peace plan that Ukrainian and American negotiators recently developed. Zelensky admitted that he would be willing to make the Donetsk region a free, demilitarized economic zone, monitored by international forces.
In the Krasnodar region, Russian regional authorities said two tanks of oil products caught fire in the southern port of Temryuk after the drone attack.
The flames covered an area of about 2,000 square meters, authorities of the Krasnodar operational headquarters reported on Telegram.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine nears its four-year mark and diplomatic efforts to end it have so far produced no tangible results, kyiv and Moscow have stepped up their drone and missile attacks on energy facilities.
kyiv has increased its strikes against Russian oil refineries and other energy infrastructure since August, aiming to reduce Moscow’s oil revenues, a key source of financing its war effort.
