“Putin only understands power. He feels like an animal: If you can’t defend yourself, it will destroy even more. His desire is conquer all of Ukraine“. Thus, in an interview with the German newspaper Bildthe Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky he dismisses the hypothesis of a truce in the conflict: “It’s like taking a break while watching a film. But it’s not a movie, it’s reality. AND this pause is for Putin“, he claims. And he says he doesn’t believe in the overtures to negotiations coming from Moscow: “Here we are dealing with Putin. Compared to everything he has said up to now, he acted differently afterwards. We can’t trust him“. Donald Trump’s peace plan revealed by the government was also rejected Washington Postaccording to which the tycoon – in the event of re-election to the White House – would like to push Kiev to cede Crimea and Donbass, the regions occupied by the Russians: “If the agreement is simply to give up our territories and if this is the idea, At that time the idea is very primitive. I think if Trump actually had his own approach to ending the war quickly, then I would be very happy to hear the idea. But we need to strong arguments. We don’t need a fanciful idea, but a real one. These are human lives, we cannot play pranks and we cannot take risks,” says Zelensky. In the meantime the Swiss government has formalized a peace conference which will be held on June 15th and 16th in a luxury hotel in Bürgenstockon Lake Lucerne: high-level government officials from dozens of countries are expected, on the basis of a plan defined in recent months by Zelensky and the Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis. Also in this case, Moscow, as in previous conferences, will not be sitting at the table, having branded the initiative as a “US operation”.
On the ground, Ukrainian forces attacked the Russian exclave of for the first time on Monday Kaliningradoverlooking the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania: the military intelligence (Gur) claimed responsibility for an operation in which the Serpukhov missile carrier, anchored in the Baltiysk naval base. “It was a special Gur operation. The ship doesn’t feel well now,” an espionage source ironically commented to the Kyiv Post underlining that “the means of communication and automation” of the vessel “were completely destroyed“. In Ukraine, however, according to the NGO DeepState cited by Ukrainska PravdaRussian forces captured the village of Pervomaiske in the Donetsk region, where fighting had been going on for a year and a half. On Wednesday, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Kiev announced that Russian soldiers killed since the beginning of the war have exceeded 450 thousand: to be precise they are 450,080, a number that includes 830 losses suffered by Russian forces in the last day. The British Ministry of Defence, in the periodic intelligence update published on X, claims that Moscow aims to recruit four hundred thousand contract soldiers by the end of the year: “This is necessary to support its troops in Ukraine, which have suffered huge losses, and to support announced plans to increase the size of the armed forces to 1.32 million this year and to 1.5 million in the future,” the report reads.
