Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met with foreign leaders in Singapore on the final day of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue security summit on June 2, where he sought to rally international support ahead of a Swiss peace conference later this month despite what he said were Chinese efforts to undermine it.
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Zelenskiy said more than 100 countries and international organizations had committed to attending the mid-June peace gathering in Switzerland.
Russia hasn't been at the event in Singapore since it launched its two-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Zelenskiy and Ukraine's defense minister, Rustem Umerov, met in Singapore for more than an hour with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin following this week's U.S. easing of restrictions on the use of its weapons by Kyiv to publicly permit Ukraine to hit targets inside Russia.
A Pentagon official said Austin "reaffirmed the U.S. commitment" to "strong support" for Ukraine and both sides vowed to "further strengthen [their] strategic defense partnership."
Earlier, Zelenskiy met with a bipartisan delegation from the U.S. House of Representatives on the sidelines of the conference and said both sides "noted the importance of allowing Ukraine to use American weapons to strike military targets on the territory of Russia in the areas bordering the Kharkiv region."
Zelenskiy said that "The issue of further strengthening of sanctions pressure on the Russian Federation was also raised."
SEE ALSO: Zelenskiy Meets With U.S. Lawmakers Ahead Of Speech At Shangri-La DialogueThe Ukrainian president also met with Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto, who at the same summit last year proposed an Indonesian plan for ending the war in Ukraine.
After meeting with Jose Ramos-Horta, the president of Timor-Leste, Zelenskiy said Ramos-Horta would also attend the peace summit planned for June 15-16 in Switzerland.
"It is very important for us to begin the process of establishing a just peace," Zelenskiy said. "Russia does not want to end the war. Therefore, we must work together with the entire world to bring peace closer."
Zelenskiy said recently amid reports that the European Union was trying to organize peace talks with Russian participation in Saudi Arabia for later this year that he had "no faith" in Russian President Vladimir Putin and around 200 rounds of talks dating back to Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014 had gone nowhere.
China, which has said it wants peace in Ukraine but has tightened relations with Moscow since the invasion began, has said it will not participate in the Swiss talks.
Zelenskiy told journalists that he regretted he couldn't meet the Chinese delegation in Singapore and that Beijing wouldn't be represented in Switzerland.
He added that "China, unfortunately...is working hard today for countries not to come to the peace summit." He also said Chinese support for Russia would prolong the war.
U.S. Pentagon chief Austin met with his Chinese counterpart, Defense Minister Dong Jun, in Singapore in their first face-to-face meeting since those contacts broke down in 2022 with tensions ratcheted up over bilateral issues, Taiwan, and Beijing's refusal to condemn and punish Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Also on June 2, Ukraine's military said its air defenses had intercepted 24 of 25 Russian attack drones overnight as the country sought to rebound from one of the biggest overnight attacks in weeks on Ukraine's power infrastructure a day earlier.
That attack killed at least eight people in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, police said, where a Russian offensive began last month.
As a result of those and other damaging attacks, state energy provider Ukrenerho said it was reintroducing blackouts for households and industrial users "in all regions of Ukraine" in the early morning and evening hours on June 2.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on May 31 that President Joe Biden had given Ukraine the go-ahead to use U.S. weapons to strike inside Russia for the limited purpose of defending Kharkiv as it tries to defeat Russian troops that began a full-scale invasion in February 2022.