China and Brazil have pressed ahead with an effort to gather developing countries behind a plan to end Russia's war in Ukraine, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's dismissal of the initiative as serving the Kremlin's interests.
Seventeen countries attended a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly chaired by China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Brazilian foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim.
Wang told reporters they discussed the need to prevent escalation in the war, to avoid the use of weapons of mass destruction and prevent attacks on nuclear power plants.
"Russia and Ukraine are neighbours that cannot be moved away from each other and amity is the only realistic option," Wang said, adding that the international community should support an international peace conference involving both Russia and Ukraine.
As well as Brazil and China, 10 countries from the "Global South" who were present, including Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey, signed a communique that Amorim said builds on an earlier six-point plan proposed by Brazil and China in May.
Countries would continue to meet in New York under a grouping of "friends for peace," he added.
Chinese President Xi Jinping signed a "no limits" partnership deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022, less than three weeks before Russian troops entered Ukraine.
China says it has not supplied Russia with weapons for use in Ukraine but the US and some other countries say its companies provide materials that Russia uses in the manufacture of weapons for the war.
Zelenskiy, in a speech to the assembly on Wednesday, questioned why China and Brazil were proposing an alternative to his own peace formula.
Proposing "alternatives, half-hearted settlement plans, so-called sets of principles" would only give Russia the political space to continue the war, he said.
Asked about Zelenskiy's comment, Amorim told Reuters, "I'm not here to respond either to Zelenskiy or Putin, just to propose a way for peace".
Meanwhile, the German government said US President Joe Biden's high-level meeting of 50 countries that support Ukraine will be held at the US military's Ramstein Air Base in the country's southwest.
Biden announced this week that he would be in Germany from October 10 to October 12 and invited Ukraine's supporters to attend a meeting in the country during that time but he did not name a location.
Such meetings have frequently taken place in Ramstein since the Russian invasion of Ukraine but so far only at the level of defence ministers.
The aim is to co-ordinate military assistance to Ukraine.
It is the outgoing US president's first bilateral visit to Germany in his nearly four years in office.
The Russian military continued its advance in eastern Ukraine on Friday and reportedly captured two more villages in the heavily contested Donbass industrial region.
The village of Marynivka and the small town of Ukrainsk were occupied this week, the Russian defence ministry said.
There was no confirmation from the army command in Kyiv.
The Ukrainian General Staff report for Friday morning described Marynivka as still being fought over.
The situation near Ukrainsk, which Ukrainian military observers have been labelling as Russian-controlled for days, is clearer.
Both settlements are located in the Donetsk region on the front line between the larger towns of Pokrovsk, Kurakhove and Vuhledar, where Russian troops made incremental but costly gains in recent months.
The report by the Ukrainian army command on Thursday cited a comparatively high number of 187 Russian attacks, with the main focus on Pokrovsk.
The situation in Vuhledar became even more critical, with military bloggers expecting the almost encircled city to fall within a few days.
Vuhledar was long considered a difficult bastion to take, its defenders inflicting heavy losses on Russian troops as they made repeated frontal attacks.
Recently, however, Russian forces were able to bypass the town's defences, which were mainly directed to the south and east, by advancing from the north.
with DPA
