Ukraine’s long-range drones destroy Russian jet on military base

 Ukraine has said its long-range drones struck two Russian Su-27 fighter jets in occupied Crimea worth $70m.

One of the planes was on the runway ready for a combat sortie when it was blown up and destroyed, Ukraine’s SBU security services said on Saturday. A second plane was damaged in the attack on the Belbek military airfield in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The strike followed a separate operation a day earlier in which the SBU said it had hit a Russian shadow fleet vessel crossing the Mediterranean sea, the first such attack in those waters since the war began.

Ukraine said the Belbek operation marked its second successful strike on the airfield in recent days.

“On Dec 18, our drones struck Russian equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” the SBU wrote, citing a Pantsir-S2 air defence system, two Nebo-SVU radars and a MiG-31 aircraft, among other military objects.

The strike came as US and Russian officials geared up for fresh talks in Florida on Saturday aimed at ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s envoy, criticised “warmongers [who] keep working overtime to undermine the US peace plan for Ukraine”.

Mr Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, is due to lead the Russian delegation in meetings with Steve Witkoff, Washington’s roving envoy and a former property tycoon, and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner met Ukraine’s delegation, led by Rustem Umerov, in Miami on Friday after earlier discussions in Berlin with Ukrainian and European officials.

Mr Umerov said after the talks that Ukraine had “agreed with our American partners on further steps and on continuing our joint work in the near future.”

Recent rounds of talks have been held in a bilateral format, with US representatives meeting separately with Russian and Ukrainian officials.

However, Volodymyr Zelensky suggested on Saturday that the US had mooted a new format involving direct talks between Ukraine and Russia, with the involvement of American and possibly European envoys.

“The US said they would have a separate meeting with representatives of Russia. And they proposed the following format, as far as I understand: Ukraine, America, Russia, and, since there are representatives of Europe there, probably Europe as well,” the Ukrainian president told reporters in Kyiv.

Ukrainian and Russian representatives have not met face-to-face since inconclusive talks in July, when they convened in Istanbul but failed at progressing negotiations beyond prisoner swaps. A Russian source told Reuters that a meeting between Mr Dmitriev and Ukrainian negotiators had been ruled out.

Western officials have reported progress this week on security guarantees for Kyiv, though it remains unclear whether Moscow will be willing to accept these terms.

Earlier this month, Mr Trump’s envoys were reported to have pressed Mr Zelensky to accept a US-brokered deal by Christmas.

However, on Friday Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that the US would not impose a ceasefire deal on Kyiv.

“There’s no peace deal unless Ukraine agrees to it,” Mr Rubio told a news conference in Washington.

Ahead of the talks, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said that Russian attacks on port infrastructure in the Odesa region had killed eight people and injured 27 others after a civilian bus was caught in the shelling.

Many of the region’s more than two million inhabitants have been left without electricity for a week, with heating and water supplies also disrupted by escalating Russian strikes on the coastline area.

“Russia is once again trying to restrict Ukraine’s access to the sea and block our coastal regions,” Mr Zelensky said on Saturday of the attacks.

Early this month, Putin threatened what he termed a “radical” option of cutting Ukraine off from the sea in response to a spate of attacks on Russia’s tanker fleet.

Kyiv, however, has signalled it remains undeterred. On Saturday, Ukraine’s General Staff announced that it had carried out kamikaze drone strikes on a Russian warship in the Caspian Sea as well as on a nearby Russian oil platform.