Moscow says no to US and EU plan for boots on ground in Ukraine

Russia has said no to US and EU plans for peacekeepers in Ukraine, while ramping up air strikes and anti-Western rhetoric. 

"I very much hope that those who are developing such plans [for a peacekeeping force] are just grandstanding, but I hope they understand that this would be absolutely unacceptable for Russia," foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told a press conference in Moscow on Thursday (21 August).

He also said European ideas on Ukraine security guarantees "follow the logic of isolating Russia, uniting the Western world with Ukraine ... to inflict a strategic defeat on us". 

"This cannot but evoke a feeling of full and categorical rejection," he said. 

The US and Europe's 'coalition of the willing' — Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK — were holding talks in Washington this week at the level of chiefs of defence on the peacekeeping plan.  

The US is reportedly offering air power, air defence systems, command and control systems, and military intelligence capabilities, such as spy satellites, while the Europeans are ready to put boots on the ground. 

And the number of Western soldiers would need to be at least 10,000, said the head of Germany's armed forces trade union, colonel André Wüstner.

"It won't be enough to have a handful of generals and smaller military units man a command post in Ukraine …  it must be made clear to Putin — and backed by international forces — that we are totally serious," he told Reuters on Thursday. 

The Washington military talks come after US president Donald Trump held back-to-back summits with Russian president Vladimir Putin and with EU and Ukrainian leaders in the past seven days.

The idea was for Putin to next meet Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy, before a trilateral summit with Trump, and a quadrilateral one with European leaders to seal a ceasefire accord. 

But Russian officials briefed Reuters on Thursday that Putin was sticking to unpalatable terms. 

Putin wanted Ukraine to cede all of its Donetsk and Luhansk regions, including the 12 percent of them not yet occupied by Russia, in return for freezing the contact line in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, the Russians said.

He also wanted legal guarantees Ukraine would stay out of Nato, remain neutral, and never host any Western forces, they said. 

And he wanted Western sanctions relief.

Budapest, Geneva, and Vienna have been discussed as possible venues for a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting. 

But for his part, Lavrov indicated that Putin saw it as beneath himself to sit down with his Ukrainian counterpart. 

He spoke of Kyiv's "neo-Nazi, Russophobic, and aggressive regime".

And Lavrov said "the question of the legitimacy of the person [Zelenskyy] signing them [any peace accords] on behalf of Ukraine" was yet to be "resolved", since Putin continued to claim that Zelenskyy had no democratic mandate.

US factory in Ukraine hit

Lavrov spoke the same day Russia struck Ukraine with 574 drones and 40 missiles, killing one person in Lviv, near the Polish border. 

Air strikes also hit a US-owned home appliances factory, in what Zelenskyy said was aimed at demotivating Trump's intervention.   

"The Russians knew exactly where they lobbed the missiles. We believe this was a deliberate attack against American property and investments in Ukraine," he said. 

"Current signals from Russia are, to be honest, indecent. They're trying to avoid the necessity to meet. They don't want to end this war," he also said.

The EU foreign service chief, Kaja Kallas, told BBC radio on Friday morning: "Putin is just laughing, not stopping the killing but increasing the killing".

Putin's offer to give a ceasefire in return for conquered land in Ukraine was a "trap", she said. 

"We are forgetting that Russia has not made one single concession," Kallas added.

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