France’s President Emmanuel Macron will be meeting and hosting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Paris on November 17 to reaffirm France’s long-term support for Ukraine, Macron’s office said on Friday.
Zelenskyy’s visit will be his ninth trip to France since the start of Russia’s war with Ukraine in 2022.
‘Helping Ukraine’
Macron’s meeting with Zelenskyy will look to build on the momentum in terms of helping Ukraine following a meeting of Ukraine’s Coalition of the Willing allies last month, added Macron’s Elysee office.
France and Britain lead the Coalition of the Willing group of countries supporting Ukraine. At the group’s last meeting on October 24, Ukraine’s European allies said frozen Russian assets needed to be used quickly to fund support for Kyiv.
Macron and Zelenskyy will also discuss bilateral co-operation in areas such as energy, the economy, and defence at their meeting.
Russian Strikes
Zelenskyy said on Friday that Russia had launched around 430 drones and 18 missiles in massive overnight attacks, while Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk – a key outlet for Russian commodity shipments – suspended oil exports after what authorities said was a major Ukrainian drone attack.
The air force said most of the drones and missiles were shot down, but officials said falling debris and fires damaged high-rise apartments, a school, a medical facility, and administrative buildings across nine districts in the city of about 3 million.
Pictures showed flames rising over the city at various sites, as residents huddled in rubble-strewn streets outside apartment buildings after the attack.
The city’s heating system also suffered damage, with service interrupted in one district, but emergency outages had been resolved, the mayor said. Partial power cuts were announced in the central Kyiv region, in the southern Odesa region, and in the Donetsk region in the east, the energy ministry said.
(with inputs from Reuters)
