Moscow: Russia hopes to make “some progress” in peace conversations with Ukraine at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Monday, said a superior Russian negotiator.
Moscow has rejected a joint Us-Ukraine proposal of a high fire and unconditional fire of 30 days, instead of suggesting only one arrest for air attacks in energy facilities.
Despite that offer, both parties have continued to launch air attacks in the period prior to negotiations.
A Russian strike in the Ukrainian city of southern Zaporizhzhia on Friday night killed a family of three, causing anger among Ukrainian officials.
American negotiators will meet separately with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia on Monday, in what the American envoy Keith Kellogg described as “transport diplomacy” between the hotel rooms.
Despite the wave of diplomacy and pressure from the president of the United States, Donald Trump, so far an advance has proven difficult to achieve.
“We hope to achieve at least some progress,” said Russian Senator Grigory Karasin, who will direct the Russian delegation, Zvezda told the television channel, without specifying what problem.
He said that he and his negotiating partner, FSB advisor Sergey Beseda, would adopt a “combative and constructive” approach for conversations.
A high Ukrainian official told AFP a day before kyiv hopes to ensure the “at least” agreement in a partial fire that covers attacks against energy, infrastructure and the sea. Kyiv is sending his Minister of Defense to negotiations.
“We go with the mentality to fight for the resolution of at least one problem,” Karasin told Zvezda, owned by the Ministry of Defense of Russia.
He said they were going to Saudi Arabia on Sunday and that they would return on Tuesday.
Drone bomb
The election of Russia of negotiators for conversations has asked questions. Both are out of traditional diplomatic decision -making institutions such as Kremlin, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Defense.
Karasin is a career diplomat who is now in the upper house of the Parliament of Russia, while Beseda has been a FSB officer for a long time and now an advisor to the director of the Security Service.
The FSB in 2014 admitted that Beseda was in kyiv during an enlightened repression in the Ukrainian capital in the middle of the country’s process.
Ukraine has accused Russia of not seeking peace genuinely and condemned his attacks ongoing, despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that he had ordered his army to stop attacking Ukrainian energy sites.
On the contrary, an American official close to Trump, the envoy of the White House, Steve Witkoff, has praised Putin, whom he met in Moscow last week, as a “great” leader who seeks to finish the conflict with kyiv.
“I thought I was directly with me,” Witkoff told an American host of Podcast from the right, Tucker Carlson, in an interview broadcast on Friday.
“I do not consider Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that took him,” said Trump’s envoy.
Russia said goodbye to 179 drones in Ukraine in her last night flood, the Ukraine Air Force said on Saturday.
In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, an entire family, including a 14 -year -old girl, was killed when an unmanned plane crashed into her house on Friday night, regional authorities said.
An AFP photographer on the scene of a strike saw the rescue workers to sift through the debris of a destroyed building, while the smoke and fog hung on the air of the night.
In the east region of Donetsk, Russian attacks killed at least two people on Saturday and wounded three, according to the local governor.
Ukraine also pointed to Russia with attacks with unmanned airplanes during the night, wounding two in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
Meanwhile, Zelensky said he had visited troops fighting to defend the oriented city of Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to surround and capture for months.
