Ukraine and Russia are in the early stages of negotiations about potentially halting airstrikes on each other’s energy facilities, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

The FT, citing sources late on Tuesday who it said included senior Ukrainian officials, reported that Ukraine was seeking to resume talks that had come close to an agreement in August and were mediated by Qatar.

The talks, the sources told the FT, had been derailed by Kyiv’s forces launching an incursion that month into Russia’s Kursk region that borders Ukraine.

“There are very early talks about potentially restarting something,” the FT cited a diplomat who the newspaper said was briefed on the negotiations as saying. “There’s now talks on the energy facilities.”

Reuters could not independently verify the report. The Kremlin, the Russian Defence Ministry, the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The FT said that the Kremlin had declined to comment and that Zelenskiy’s office had not responded to its requests for comment.

A big chunk of Ukraine’s power capacity has been destroyed or seized due to Russian attacks on energy infrastructure since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its smaller neighbour in 2022, forcing Kyiv to rely on its nuclear power facilities and imports of energy from Europe.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last month that Russia had knocked out the gigawatt equivalent of over half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The European Union aimed to restore 2.5 GW of capacity, about 15% of the country’s needs, she said referring to proposed EU-funded repairs.

Ukraine had no powerful long-range weapons at the start of the war, but has since developed long-range attack drones and used them to hit targets deep inside Russia, ranging from oil refineries to power plants and military airfields.

Zelenskiy told the FT earlier in October that a deal to protect energy facilities could signal a Russian willingness to engage in broader peace talks. Moscow says it wants peace, but has set conditions that Kyiv regards as unacceptable.

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Ukraine’s top commander said on Monday Kyiv controlled around 1,000 square kilometres of Russia’s Kursk region, his first public comments since Ukraine launched its biggest cross-border attack in almost 2-1/2 years of full-scale war.

With Russia still struggling to repel the incursion seven days after it began, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy published a video clip of Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of his armed forces, delivering a report on the fighting.

“We continue to conduct an offensive operation in the Kursk region. Currently, we control about 1,000 square kilometres of the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said.

Zelensky said the meeting of top-level officials had ordered the preparation of a “humanitarian plan” for the area.

Russia’s acting governor of Kursk region, Alexei Smirnov, said Ukraine controlled 28 settlements, and the incursion was about 12 km deep and 40 km wide.

In a statement, the Ukrainian leader said the defence ministry and diplomats has been ordered to present a list of “necessary actions” needed to secure permission from Kyiv’s Western allies to use long-range weapons for strikes on Russia.

Defence Minister Rustem Umerov urged Paris earlier on Monday to lift the ban on Western weapons strikes on military targets in Russia during a call with French counterpart Sebastien Lecornu, the Ukrainian readout said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Smoke rises after recent Russian air strikes, near a memorial to soldiers who died in World War Two, in the town of Toretsk, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, near a front line in Donetsk region, Ukraine July 3, 2024. Image used for representative purpose only.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

A village in a border region of western Russia was evacuated on July 7 following a series of explosions after debris from a downed Ukrainian drone set fire to a nearby warehouse, local officials said.

Social media footage appeared to show rising clouds of black smoke in the Voronezh region while loud explosions could be heard in succession.

Governor Aleksandr Gusev said that falling wreckage triggered the “detonation of explosive objects”. No casualties were reported, but residents of a nearby village in the Podgorensky district were evacuated, he said. Roads were also closed with emergency services, military and government officials working at the scene.

A Ukrainian security official told The Associated Press that a strike had been carried out on a warehouse storing ammunition in the village of Serhiivka in the Voronezh region.

“The enemy stored surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, shells for tanks and artillery, and boxes of cartridges for firearms,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to give the information to the media. “It is from this warehouse that the occupiers supply ammunition to their troops in Ukraine.”

The official also said that Ukraine’s State Security Service was behind a drone attack on an oil depot in Russia’s Krasnodar region the previous day. Russian emergency services had reported that falling drone debris had started a fire at the site, which was successfully extinguished Sunday morning.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence did not address either strike in their morning briefing, but said that air defence systems had destroyed a Ukrainian drone over the Belgorod region.

The strikes come after a Ukrainian military spokesperson told AP on Thursday that Kyiv’s troops had retreated from a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a strategically important town in Ukraine’s Donetsk region that has been reduced to rubble under a month-long Russian assault.

Russian forces have for months tried to grind out gains in Ukraine’s industrial east, in an apparent attempt to lock its defenders into a war of attrition. In a joint investigation published Friday, independent Russian news outlets Meduza and Mediazona reported that Moscow’s forces were losing between 200 and 250 soldiers in Ukraine each day.

Military analysts say Chasiv Yar’s fall could also compromise critical Ukrainian supply routes and put nearby cities in jeopardy, bringing Russia closer to its stated aim of seizing the entire Donetsk region.

Russian strikes have also heavily targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Officials in Kyiv said Saturday that the city had restored two-thirds of its power generation capacity after recent Russian missile attacks destroyed key power plants.

“Colossal work has been carried out,” said deputy head of the Kyiv city administration Petro Panteleev. “The city’s energy facilities, which were built mainly in the Soviet period, are being modernized and become much more efficient.”

Russia sent overnight into Sunday two ballistic missiles and 13 Shahed drones, Ukrainian air force officials said. All were shot down but the officials did not elaborate on the impact of the missiles.

Eight people were killed in Russian attacks across Ukraine in the past day, according to local regional authorities.

Four people were killed in the Kherson region, said Gov Oleksandr Prokudin, while in Donetsk, Gov Vadym Filashkin said another two people had been killed in the towns of Niu-York and Ukrainsk. In Dnipropetrovsk, a 65-year-old woman was killed in a Russian attack in the Nikopol district, while a 47-year old man was killed in the Kharkiv region, Governors Serhii Lysak and Oleh Syniehubov said in their respective statements.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, 14 people died after a bus collided with a cargo vehicle, leaving a single survivor, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said Saturday evening. The victims included a 6-year-old child.