France will transfer Mirage-2000 fighter jets to Ukraine and train Ukrainian pilots, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has announced. “You need normally between five-six months. So by the end of the year there will be pilots. The pilots will be trained in France,” said Macron.
France would also equip and train an entire brigade of 4,500 Ukrainian soldiers, Macron said. Amid speculation that Macron could swiftly announce the sending of French instructors to Ukraine, the president said France and its allies would come together and decide, but he emphasised that he did not believe any such move by Paris would be “escalatory”.
Ukrenergo gave notice late on Thursday of power cuts in 12 regions including the capital, Kyiv, and spanning much of Ukraine after consumption limits were breached. It comes amid critical power shortages caused by heavy Russian attacks on power stations and the grid. Ukraine’s electricity grid operator said the cuts would apply to regions including Lviv and Zakarpattia in the west, extending to Kyiv and Kyiv region and to Odesa in the south and Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia farther east. The cuts would end, it said, once set consumption limits were observed.
The US encourages China to attend the Ukraine peace summit this month in Switzerland, a US state department spokesperson has said. “They’ve attended previous versions of the summit. We thought their presence was helpful. We think their presence would be helpful here.” China has said it will stay away unless Russia is invited. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on the weekend that China had also been discouraging other countries from attending.
After Vladimir Putin said Russia might let other countries strike at western interests using its weapons, the US president, Joe Biden, said Ukraine was limited in firing US-supplied weapons at targets inside Russia near the countries’ border. “We’re not talking about giving them weapons to strike Moscow, to strike the Kremlin,” Biden said. “Just across the border where they’re receiving significant fire from conventional weapons used by the Russians to go into Ukraine to kill Ukrainians.”
Biden and Macron marked the 80th anniversary of D-day with a rallying cry for support for Ukraine as Volodymyr Zelenskiy was embraced by western leaders in Normandy. The US president described the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as a “tyrant bent on domination … To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable.”
In a speech at the American cemetery in Normandy, Biden continued: “If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches … We will not walk away because if we do Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there. Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened. There are things that are worth fighting and dying for. Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it.”