Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine can take back Crimea only through diplomatic means. “We cannot spend dozens of, thousands of our people so that they perish for the sake of Crimea coming back … we understand that Crimea can be brought back diplomatically,” the Ukrainian president told Fox News. Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. “I was already mentioning that we are ready to bring Crimea back diplomatically,” Zelenskyy said.
Asked on Fox whether Ukraine might give up territory for peace, Zelenskyy said: “We cannot legally acknowledge any occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian. That is about those territories … occupied by Putin before the full-scale invasion, since 2014. Legally, we are not acknowledging that, we are not adopting that.”
Russia staged “a massive information-psychological attack” against Ukraine by spreading a fake warning, purportedly from Ukrainian military intelligence, about an imminent mass air attack, Kyiv’s Main Directorate of Intelligence said on Wednesday. “This message is a fake, it contains grammatical errors typical of Russian information and psychological operations.” Ukraine on Wednesday downplayed the threat of any imminent and large-scale missile threat after several foreign embassies in Kyiv closed for a day citing a “potential” strike. “We remind you that the threat of strikes by the aggressor state has unfortunately been a daily reality for Ukrainians for over 1,000 days,” said a foreign ministry statement.
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on a state visit in Brazil, said he wanted to see “more voices committed to peace to pave the way for a political solution to the Ukraine crisis”, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.
Ukraine has fired UK-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, the Guardian understands from multiple sources. Dan Sabbagh and Andrew Roth write that video circulated by pro-Russian war bloggers indicated that up to 12 missiles struck a target believed to be a command headquarters in the village of Maryno, in the Kursk region where Ukraine holds territory. Ukrainian media reported that the site may have been used by North Korean and Russian officers.
Zelenskyy thanked the US and Joe Biden for the provision of landmines to Ukrainian troops, calling it “essential … to stop Russian assaults” in a video address on Wednesday. In addition to the landmines, the latest $275m US aid package includes drones, Himars rockets and artillery.
