• Zelenskiy criticises US pressure for Ukraine concessions.
• Says progress made but positions differ.
• Russia says further talks will be held soon.
  

Peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Geneva ended on Wednesday after only two hours, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy describing them as “difficult” and accusing Russia of deliberately delaying progress toward a deal to end the four-year-old war.

The two days of US-mediated peace talks in Switzerland took place as US President Donald Trump has twice in recent days suggested it was up to Ukraine and Zelenskiy to ensure the talks were successful.

“We can see that progress has been made, but for now, positions differ because the negotiations were difficult,” Zelenskiy told reporters in a WhatsApp chat shortly after talks concluded.

Rustem Umerov, the head of Kyiv’s negotiating team, said separately that the second day had been “intensive and substantive”. Both sides were working toward decisions that can be sent to their presidents, he said.

Russia’s chief negotiator, former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, told reporters that further negotiations would be held soon, without specifying a date. Earlier on Wednesday, Zelenskiy had accused Russia of “trying to drag out negotiations that could already have reached the final stage”.

Ukrainian officials have routinely accused Moscow – which has carried out a winter bombing campaign against Ukraine’s energy system and pursued its battlefield offensive – of negotiating in bad faith.

Pressure from Trump

In an interview with US website Axios published on Tuesday, Zelenskiy was quoted as saying that it was “not fair” Trump kept publicly calling on Ukraine, not Russia, to make concessions in negotiating terms for a peace plan.

Trump had told reporters on Monday that “Ukraine better come to the table fast. That’s all I’m telling you.”

Zelenskiy also said any plan requiring Ukraine to give up territory that Russia had not captured in the eastern Donbas region would be rejected by Ukrainians if put to a referendum.

“I hope it is just his tactics and not the decision,” Axios quoted Zelenskiy as saying in the interview.

Push for European involvement

The talks came just days before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s 2022 invasion of its much smaller neighbour. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, millions have fled their homes, and many Ukrainian cities, towns and villages have been devastated by the conflict.

Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians.

Umerov said on Tuesday that the first day of talks had focused on “practical issues and the mechanics of possible decisions,” without providing details. However, Russian news agencies quoted a source as saying that the Tuesday talks were “very tense” and lasted six hours in different bilateral and trilateral formats.

Ukrainian government bonds fell as much as 1.9 cents on the dollar in morning trade in Europe on reports of stalled progress at the talks.

Before the talks began, Umerov had played down hopes for a significant step forward in Geneva, saying the Ukrainian delegation was working “without excessive expectations”.

The Geneva meeting follows two rounds of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi that concluded without a major breakthrough as the two sides remained far apart on key issues such as the control of territory in eastern Ukraine.

Russia occupies about 20% of Ukraine’s national territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region, which it seized before the 2022 full-scale invasion. Its recent airstrikes on energy infrastructure have left hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without heating and power during a harsh winter.

MOSCOW: The Kremlin said on Wednesday that neither China nor Russia havecarried out secret nuclear tests, noting Beijing had denied US accusations that it had done so.

The United States this month accused China of conducting a secret nuclear test in 2020 as it called for a new, broader arms control treaty that would bring in China as well as Russia.

“We’ve heard many references to certain tests. Both the Russian Federation and China have been mentioned in this regard. Neither the Russian Federation nor China has conducted any nuclear tests,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“We also know that these allegations were categorically denied by a representative of the People’s Republic of China, so that’s the situation,” added Peskov.

US President Donald Trump is pressing China to join the US and Russia to negotiate a replacement pact to New START, the last US-Russian nuclear arms control agreement, which expired on February 5.

The treaty’s expiration has fuelled concerns among some experts that the world is on the verge of an accelerated nuclear arms race, though other arms control experts say such fears are exaggerated.

Molten glass drops through chutes before being blown into bottles at manufacturer Encirc’s northwest England plant, where intensive operations are under strain from exorbitant energy prices weighing on Britain’s heavy industry.

“We’re paying a lot more energy costs than our European competitors,” said Oliver Harry, head of corporate affairs at Encirc, which makes over a third of the UK’s glass bottles.

Britain has some of the highest energy prices in Europe, driven by its reliance on natural gas and the costs of transitioning to renewables, which are passed on to bills.

The country’s industrial electricity prices were also the steepest in Europe in 2024, according to the latest annual government data.

Standing in the intense heat of the factory’s two huge furnaces, Harry warned: “We’re already seeing an increase in imports into the UK as customers turn to cheap, more unsustainable glass producers”, notably from China and Turkey.

More action needed

Across energy-intensive industries — from steel and chemicals to glass and cement — companies are warning that government support does not go far enough to keep them competitive.

The government said it will increase discounts on electricity network charges to 90 percent from April, which will save around 500 of the UK’s biggest energy users a cumulative £420 million ($570 million) per year in electricity bills.

“Lowering bills is central to every decision we make,” a government spokesperson told AFP.

But the steel sector, already weakened by the closure of traditional coal-fired blast furnaces, argues that more action is needed.

“The industry still faces industrial power prices almost 40 percent higher than in France and Germany,” Gareth Stace, director general of the steel union, UK Steel, told AFP.

The union has called for stronger protections similar to those in France, Italy, Spain and the UAE to shield heavy industry from high wholesale power costs.

Decarbonisation

Electricity is so expensive in the UK largely because more than a quarter of its power still comes from gas, which surged in price after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

While wholesale prices have since fallen, they remain elevated.

Under the liberalised electricity market, the last power station switched on to meet demand sets the price for all generators, and in the UK, that station is usually gas-powered.

“In France, nuclear sets the price fairly often and nuclear is cheaper … so it’s not always the same expensive gas that sets the price,” Sam Frankhauser, professor of economics and climate change policy at Oxford University, told AFP.

In other countries “there’s moments in the day where somebody cheaper sets the price and in the UK, those moments don’t exist” as it is almost always a natural gas plant setting the price, he added.

At Encirc’s Elton factory, where bottles clatter along the conveyor belts to be filled and labelled, executives say energy prices are inseparable from the push to decarbonise.

By the end of the decade, “we’re going to be producing glass bottles that are 80 percent reduced carbon,” said Harry.

“The UK managed to decarbonise the grid phenomenally because of the exit of coal,” said Gregor Singer, professor at the London School of Economics.

“It’s really unfortunate that this gas price shock came now, exactly at that point where you sort of exited coal but you don’t quite have enough renewables yet.”

“In the medium to long run… it’s almost guaranteed that prices are coming down,” he said.