Ukraine has said 12 people have been killed in a Russian raid on regional government headquarters in Mykolaiv, bringing the death toll to an estimated 20,000 so far. Vitaliy Kim, the regional governor, said he survived the attack because he slept too much. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-run Tass news agency reported that a shell had hit a makeshift camp near the border with Ukraine late Tuesday, citing a source who said it had been fired from the Ukrainian side. The video posted on the internet appears to show ammunition exploding outside the city of Belgorod. Royal Air Force aircraft could impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine under the terms of a peace offer made by Kyiv in Moscow on Tuesday, in what has been described as the most important day of negotiations so far.
Kyiv proposed an agreement that would mean that Britain, the United States, China, France, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Israel would be legally obliged to defend a neutral Ukraine from future Russian aggression. If necessary, they would provide Kyiv with “military assistance, armor and airspace over Ukraine,” officials said. None of the named countries has responded publicly. “We want an international security guarantee mechanism where the guarantor countries will act in a similar way to NATO Article Five – and even more firmly,” Ukrainian negotiator David Arahamia told reporters. Article 5 obliges NATO allies to consider an attack on one as an attack on all. In return, Ukraine would become permanently neutral, meaning it would never join NATO, develop nuclear weapons or host foreign military bases on its territory. Ukraine’s negotiator Oleksandr Chaly said security guarantees for members of NATO and the UN Security Council were “a possible form of ending the war”. NATO leaders, including Johnson and Biden, have repeatedly rejected Zelensky’s calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine for fear of sparking a war between Russia and the alliance. Ukraine proposes to bypass the issue of secessionist territories in the eastern Donbass region. In order for security guarantees to take effect quickly, the agreement will “temporarily exclude” these areas. It calls for negotiations on the status of Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, for the next 15 years without either side resorting to military force. Kyiv has other conditions, including the red line that “nothing and no one will hinder Ukraine’s accession to the EU.”