OSLO, Norway — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Norway on Tuesday for talks with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and European leaders, as relations between Kyiv and President Donald Trump continue to slide, BBC News and Al Jazeera reported.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Zelenskyy had asked Oslo and neighbouring Finland to organise the meeting “at a critical time for Ukraine,” and that the aim was to steer relations towards “a more constructive path.” Jared Kushner was expected to take part by video link, along with Finnish President Alexander Stubb and officials from the U.K., Poland, France, Germany, the EU and NATO, the BBC reported.
Before the talks, Zelenskyy said he had held a “substantive conversation” with Secretary of State Marco Rubio about ballistic missile interceptors, early warning of Russian attacks and SpaceX’s Starlink network:
Rubio, speaking in India, rejected suggestions that Washington was deliberately hindering Ukraine’s defences. “I saw someone associated with the Ukrainian government say that people of Ukraine are dying because the U.S. is denying them information,” he said. “That’s scandalous, that’s outrageous, that’s just simply not true,” CBC News reported. He denied any “deliberate political directive to harm Ukraine,” but acknowledged that Patriot interceptors may not yet have arrived. “I also talked to Saudi Arabia today, they’d like interceptors, Israel would like interceptors, we would like interceptors,” he said.
Rubio was responding after Zelenskyy’s military technical adviser, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, told the BBC that the lack of reliable U.S. warnings meant lives were being lost. “Sometimes we receive this information before the attack, another time we [do] not,” he said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he hoped a meeting with Witkoff could be organised in the near future, adding that “we greatly appreciate the mediation efforts of the American negotiators.” It was not yet clear whether Witkoff would travel on to Russia, the BBC reported.
Russian attacks killed at least seven people across Ukraine on Tuesday, including three when two vehicles caught fire on the Kyiv-Odesa highway, CBC News reported. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg that “the only one who doesn’t want peace is Russia.”
Sources: BBC News, CBC News, Al Jazeera
—
