Russia urges Ukraine's allies to start negotiations to prevent the ‘destruction of the Ukrainian people’

Russia on Thursday urged Ukraine's Western allies to open negotiations with Moscow on pain of ‘destruction of the Ukrainian people’, just hours after another ‘massive’ drone attack in Kiev. 

More than two and a half years after the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Moscow is in a position of strength on the eastern front, where its army is advancing faster and faster against fewer and less well-equipped Ukrainian troops. 

The head of the Russian Security Council and former Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu urged Western powers in a threatening tone to open negotiations favourable to Moscow. 

‘The situation in the theatre of hostilities does not favour the Kiev regime. The West had a choice: to continue its financing [of Ukraine] and the destruction of the Ukrainian people or to admit the existing reality and start negotiating,’ he said. 

These statements come a day after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Ukraine's main political and military ally. 

During his election campaign, Trump, who boasted that he could end the war in a day, repeatedly denounced the scale of aid to Kiev. 

The ball is now in the Americans' court, Russian diplomatic chief Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday. 

‘We will see if there are proposals’ from the new administration, he said. 

Shoigu's comments also come after another night of aerial bombardment across the country, a new ‘massive’ Russian drone attack, which left two people injured, and Moscow claimed the capture of yet another village in eastern Ukraine. 

Russia has systematically targeted the Ukrainian capital with drone and missile strikes since the first day of its invasion launched in February 2022.