LONDON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived Monday in England for a meeting with Prime Minister Andy Burnham, a visit the British leader said is intended to signal the country's “unwavering” support for Kyiv.
Zelenskyy's visit is the first by a foreign leader since Burnham took office a week ago. His predecessor, Keir Starmer, was in Kyiv less than two weeks ago in his last overseas trip before leaving office.
Burnham will be the fifth
British prime minister to deal with Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Russia should be in no doubt of our resolve, and we will not back down until we achieve long lasting and just peace for Ukraine,” said Burnham, who has spent the past nine years as mayor of Greater Manchester and has little foreign policy experience.
The trip to a naval base in Portsmouth on England’s south coast comes a day before Zelenskyy is expected to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington.
Zelenskyy posted on X that he had arrived in Britain for the meeting with Burnham "as well as with our warriors" in the U.K.
He and Burnham will meet more than 200 Ukrainian military personnel who have spent three weeks in Britain for an exercise aimed at strengthening their fighting capabilities and measures to counter mines in the Black Sea, the U.K. government said.
The U.K. will give Ukraine the intellectual property behind its new “Stone Cloak” electronic warfare system, which is capable of jamming Russian air defenses to stop drones from being detected, Burnham’s office said.
Ukraine has expanded its campaign of frequent drone attacks deep inside Russia that have targeted oil facilities, military factories and, most recently, logistical centers, bringing the war home to millions of Russians and raising pressure on President Vladimir Putin.
The raids have shattered Putin’s narrative of the conflict as something that doesn’t affect the lives of ordinary people in his country. But he has remained undeterred and Russia has ramped up its aerial campaign, regularly bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones.
Russia again attacked Ukraine overnight with 147 long-range drones, according to the Ukrainian air force, which said it intercepted or jammed 123 of them.
In Zaporizhzhia, one person was killed and two injured in attacks on the city that damaged a high-rise residential building and several private residences overnight, according to regional administration head Ivan Fedorov.
A Russian strike on the town of Balakliia in the Kharkiv region killed one person and wounded eight, according to Vitalii Karabanov, head of the city military administration.
In the Nikopol district of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian strikes damaged a kindergarten, residential buildings and infrastructure, injuring a woman and a 6-year-old boy, according to administration head Oleksandr Hanzha.
In the eastern Kharkiv region, a regional council member said Russian forces destroyed every gas station along the highway between Kharkiv and Poltava, a distance of about 150 kilometers (93 miles). Oleksandr Skoryk said the situation is becoming more critical daily, but the region is not facing a fuel or food crisis.
The highway is a key supply route linking Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city and a regional hub close to the Russian border, with central Ukraine. Russia has intensified strikes on gas stations, power facilities and other infrastructure this year as part of a broader campaign to strain Ukraine’s logistics and energy networks.
Romania’s Ministry of National Defense said a drone briefly entered its airspace before crossing the river border into Ukraine, where explosions were subsequently reported. It said two F-16 fighter jets were deployed to monitor airspace.
The drone’s incursion into Romanian airspace marked the fourth such incident in as many days. The three previous drones were all shot down by the NATO member.
In Moscow, Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses downed 276 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Rostov regional Gov. Yuri Slyusar said five people, including a child, were killed when a Ukrainian drone hit an apartment building in Rostov-on-Don. Ukraine’s military General Staff said Ukrainian forces struck an export terminal in Rostov-on-Don, setting it ablaze.
The Ukrainian military said other strikes in the Moscow-held part of the Kherson region targeted a ground relay station used to control drones and a bridge over the Henichesk Strait that Russia uses for military logistics. Russian fuel and supply depots were also hit.
In the city of Belgorod in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, a Ukrainian drone attack injured 12, including two children, according to regional emergency officials.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Ukraine struck an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea, killing a sailor.
In a statement on X on Sunday, Araghchi denounced the attack as a “blatant U.N. Charter violation done at Israel’s behest to drag Europe into its war.” He said he made it clear in calls with the European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the attack “can't go unanswered.”
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea over the weekend achieved “very good results,” adding that the targets included “vessels involved in transporting military cargo linked to Iran, as well as a warship.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha rejected Iran’s threats of retaliation as unjustified and groundless, saying Tehran's weapons supplies to Russia have made it a direct accomplice to Moscow's aggression. “Iran has no standing to pretend to be a victim," he posted on X, and called its references to the U.N. Charter “absurd.”
Sybiha said Iran’s statements were an attempt to divert attention from Russia’s attacks on civilian shipping in the Black Sea, which would be a focus of an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting Monday.
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Hanna Arhirova and Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Stephen McGrath in Bucharest, Romania, contributed.
