Ukraine allies ‘determined to to go further than ever’ to pressure Putin

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on allies to sanction all Russian oil companies and help to bolster Ukraine’s long-range missile capabilities after meeting with European leaders in the United Kingdom.

Flanked by other leaders at a joint news conference in London on Friday, Zelenskyy praised the United States’s new sanctions against Russian oil giants Lukoil and Rosneft and suggested that more sweeping measures should be taken against Russia’s lucrative energy sector.

“Sanctions that hit Russian oil – Russian oil infrastructure, Russian oil companies – are a big step, and I thank President Trump and all our partners who are implementing this,” he said.

“We have to apply pressure not only to Rosneft and Lukoil, but also to all Russian oil companies … and to the shadow fleet and its infrastructure.”

Zelenskyy was joined at the Foreign Office by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof.

About 20 other leaders joined via videolink at the meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing”, a group of countries that have pledged strengthened support for Ukraine.

The meeting was billed as a step towards working out how to protect Ukraine’s power grid from Russia’s almost daily drone and missile attacks as another punishing winter approaches, enhancing Ukrainian air defences and supplying Kyiv with longer-range missiles that can strike deep inside Russia.

Starmer said the leaders crafted a “clear plan” for the rest of the year but stopped short of sharing any concrete commitments.

“Working with the US, this coalition is determined to go further than ever to ratchet up the pressure on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” he said.

Russia has intensified its heavy bombardments of Ukraine, targeting civilian areas as well as energy infrastructure before winter. Rolling power cuts have been introduced across the country in recent days, including in Kyiv, as the country rations electricity.

Putin has so far resisted efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with Zelenskyy and has argued that Russia’s all-out invasion of its smaller neighbour is legitimate.

Schoof, the Dutch prime minister, said it would “good” for the EU to copy US sanctions against Lukoil and Rosneft.

The EU adopted its 19th package of sanctions on Thursday, introducing a full transaction ban on Rosneft and halting the import of Russian liquefied natural gas starting January 2027 for long-term contracts and within six months for short-term contracts.

“We must also do more to dismantle the shadow fleet systems, and the Netherlands will take its part when it comes to the North Sea,” Schoof added.

The allies also promised to provide a path forward for reparation loans to Ukraine by Christmas, as Starmer called for the unfreezing of Russian assets to aid Ukraine – a move that the EU declined to make on Thursday amid opposition from Belgium.

“We have to work in a way that we have a solution before Christmas Eve so we are able to ensure that we can finance Ukraine for the next years,” Denmark’s Frederiksen said. “I am sure that we will be able to do that.”

War shows no sign of subsiding

Any peace agreement appears at the moment to be a distant possibility, making “any sense at all of optimism” notably absent from Friday’s meeting, said Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from London.

“Quite the opposite: There was the sense that this country is gearing up to descend into a fourth winter” of war, Hull added.

Meanwhile, fighting continues on the front lines.

A Ukrainian drone crashed into an apartment block in a Moscow suburb on Friday, wounding a boy and four other people, officials said.

While such attacks are common inside major Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, this was a rare strike close to the Russian capital. It hit the 14th floor of a residential building in Krasnogorsk on the western edge of Moscow, the governor of the Moscow region, Andrey Vorobyov, said on Telegram.

The attack came after both countries traded another night of aerial strikes.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said on Friday that its forces downed 111 Ukrainian drones over several regions overnight, and the debris caused damage to homes and infrastructure. Ukraine’s air force said Moscow launched 128 drones during the night.

Elsewhere, the Russian Defence Ministry said its forces had taken control of three more villages in eastern Ukraine. Russian news agencies cited the ministry as saying Russian troops took Bolohivka in the Kharkiv region, Promin in the Donetsk region and Zlagoda in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

Earlier, the ministry also said its forces had captured the settlement of Dronivka in Donetsk.