In blow to Trump plan, Russia rejects European peacekeepers in Ukraine

Overnight air strikes by Russia caused a near-total power outage in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

January 8, 2026 at 7:33 a.m. EST Today 

A street in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, during a power blackout following a Russian drone strike on Wednesday. (Reuters)

By David L. Stern, Francesca Ebel, Kostiantyn Khudov and Serhiy Morgunov, The Washington Post, [Jan 8] 

KYIV -- After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed progress in developing a plan for postwar security guarantees, Russia’s foreign ministry on Thursday again rejected a core pillar of the emerging peace initiative: the deployment of British and European soldiers as part of a peacekeeping force. Russia said it regarded the prospect of foreign troops in Ukraine as a “direct threat.”

Russia’s refusal to accept a peacekeeping force poses a serious obstacle to the effort by President Donald Trump to halt the war but it is hardly the only provision in Trump’s plan that the Kremlin opposes.

 

President Vladimir Putin went to war in Ukraine largely to break the country’s ties with the West and return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit. Many points in Trump’s plan would strengthen Ukraine’s ties with the West.

Zelensky met in Paris on Tuesday with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron where they signed a “declaration of intent” for a possible future international peacekeeping force. The signing ceremony capped a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” — about 30 countries that have said they will support Ukraine if a ceasefire deal goes into effect.

On Thursday, Zelensky said that a bilateral document on security guarantees was “now essentially ready for finalization at the highest level with the President of the United States.”

“We understand that the American side will engage with Russia,” Zelensky wrote in a statement, “and we expect feedback on whether the aggressor is genuinely willing to end the war.”

That feedback came quickly, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying the proposal remains unacceptable to the Kremlin. Russia had previously said that it would regard any foreign troops in Ukraine as a legitimate military target.

“The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warns that the deployment of military units, military facilities, warehouses, and other infrastructure of Western countries on Ukrainian territory will be classified as foreign intervention, posing a direct threat to the security of not only Russia but also other European countries,” Zakharova said in a statement on Thursday. “All such units and facilities will be considered legitimate combat targets of the Russian Armed Forces.”

The declaration of intent “paves the way for the legal framework, under which British, French and partner forces could operate on Ukrainian soil,” Starmer said. However, the statement did not provide key details about the force, such as troop numbers or where in Ukraine they could be deployed.

Ukrainian and U.S. officials — including chief Russia negotiator Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — attended the talks in Paris on Tuesday.

The proposed peacekeeping force has been a constant sticking point throughout the diplomatic effort to end the war.

“I won’t lie and pretend that I understand the meaning of the Paris declaration … but from what has been made available to us, we can conclude that this is still the European vision of solving Ukraine’s security problem, which has already been repeatedly rejected by Moscow,” London-based Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov wrote on his popular Telegram channel. Pastukhov, an honorary professor at University College London, added: “Where is the lever with which we can force Moscow to change its position?”

Meanwhile, swarms of Russian attack drones continued to pound the eastern Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk overnight, plunging almost the entire area into darkness — one of the widest blackouts there since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, local officials said."

This is the first such situation for the Zaporizhzhia region in the last four years — a total blackout in our region,” the head of the regional administration, Ivan Fedorov, said on Ukrainian television on Thursday.

 

Fedorov also wrote on social media late Wednesday that because of the power outage, “air raid sirens could not be heard,” but “in the event of an air threat, residents will be informed via loudspeakers by the Zaporizhzhia region’s patrol police.”

Russia’s latest assault on Ukrainian infrastructure occurred as the U.S. operation in Venezuela ousting President Nicolás Maduro, along with comments in Washington about potential military action in Greenland, risk distracting attention from the war in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, high-ranking officials from Europe, Ukraine and the United States met in Paris to continue crafting a proposal to halt Russia’s war, including potential security guarantees for Ukraine to deter another Russian attack. Those guarantees could introduce European peacekeeping forces on Ukrainian soil. 

However, Russia has not agreed to the peace plan and has said it would not accept the presence of foreign troops in Ukraine.

Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have pointed to Russia’s longtime support of Maduro, and Russia’s effort to protect oil tankers that are part of a shadow fleet serving Venezuela, as further evidence that Moscow is not aligned with Trump’s goals.

By Thursday afternoon, power had resumed in Zaporizhzhia and was “operating on schedule,” Zelensky said in a social media post. However, electricity in Dnipropetrovsk was only partially restored and “work continued” in the cities of “Dnipro, Kamianske, Kryvyi Rih, Nikopol, Pavlohrad and other cities and communities,” the president said.

Zelensky appealed to Ukraine’s “partners around the world” to “respond to this deliberate torment of our people.”

“Diplomatic discussions cannot be a pretext for slowing down the supply of air defense systems and equipment that helps protect lives,” Zelensky said, adding that there is “absolutely no military rationale in such strikes on the energy sector and infrastructure that leave people without electricity and heating in wintertime.”

Ukraine’s air force said in a social media post on Thursday that 27 Russian attack drones struck 13 locations in Ukraine, while Ukrainian air defenses shot down 70 drones.

In a social media post on Thursday, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for reconstruction, Oleksiy Kuleba, said that repair work was underway to restore heat and water “for over a million subscribers.”

“As of the morning, about 800,000 consumers in the Dnipropetrovsk region remain without electricity,” Ukraine’s energy minister, Artem Nekrasov, said at a briefing Thursday. Nekrasov also said that “eight mines were left without power” because of the attack, but “all workers were brought to the surface.”

Mayor Borys Filatov of Dnipro, the capital of Dnipropetrovsk, wrote on the Telegram messaging platform that “all city hospitals have been fully switched to generators. There are necessary water reserves. The treatment process is not being interrupted.”

Ukraine’s state railway company wrote on Telegram on Wednesday as the attack in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia was ongoing that “all trains in the region are switching to backup thermal power” and signaling and communication systems were operating on backup power, and train stations were being powered by generators.

Ebel reported from London.