Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is set to meet with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as Ukraine seeks further military support amid a recent escalation in Russia’s bombing campaign, despite United States-led efforts to end the war.
During their talks in Berlin on Wednesday, Zelenskyy and Merz are also expected to discuss sanctions on Russia.
According to a German government spokesperson, Merz will receive Zelenskyy with military honours at the federal chancellery at 10:00 GMT.
The Berlin talks follow Russia and Ukraine’s direct face-to-face talks in Turkiye earlier in May. Despite pressure from United States President Donald Trump to end the war, the talks failed to produce a ceasefire agreement.
Merz raised further doubts about the prospects for a quick resolution to end the war on Tuesday, saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “at the moment no interest in a ceasefire, or a peace deal”.
“This means, as a consequence, that Ukraine must continue to defend itself – and that we must actually intensify our efforts to enable Ukraine to do so.”
The German leader added that the war was not just about Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
“The political order that we jointly established with Russia after 1990 is being fundamentally called into question,” he explained.
Long-range weapons
A day earlier, on Monday, Merz said that Ukraine’s main Western allies, including the US and the United Kingdom, were no longer imposing restrictions on the range of weapons supplied to Kyiv.
“This means that Ukraine can now defend itself, for example, by attacking military positions in Russia … With very few exceptions, it didn’t do that until recently. It can now do that,” he said in a TV interview.
However, the German leader did not specify when the government had decided to lift the restrictions.
The Kremlin said that lifting the range limits on arms delivered to Ukraine would be “dangerous”.
“If these decisions have indeed been made, they are completely at odds with our aspirations for a political (peace) settlement … These are quite dangerous decisions, if they have been made,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian journalist Alexander Yunashev.
Meanwhile, fighting has continued along the roughly 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) front line, and both sides have conducted deep strikes. Russia launched its biggest drone attack of the war against Ukraine on Sunday.
Russian air defences downed 296 Ukrainian drones over 13 Russian regions late Tuesday and early Wednesday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that air defences shot down 33 drones heading toward the capital.
Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said that 42 drones were downed. He said that drone fragments damaged three residential buildings in the village of Troitskoye, but no one was hurt.
Moscow airports delayed or diverted hundreds of flights.
Overnight, Russian forces launched an attack on Ukraine using five Iskander ballistic missiles, one guided air-launched missile and 88 drones, Ukraine’s Air Force said on Wednesday. Air defence units shot down 34 drones, and 37 drones were jammed.
Ukraine’s railway infrastructure and equipment in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Sumy regions also came under fire overnight and Wednesday morning, Ukraine’s state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia said. No casualties were reported.
In Kharkiv region, railway traffic was temporarily suspended so that police and emergency workers could clear debris from a downed drone that landed on the tracks. In Sloviansk in the Donetsk region, the attack shattered windows at the station building, and drone debris slightly damaged a train car.
