Spiegel reported that French and Italian officials had expressed scepticism about providing significant funding to support Kyiv, citing Paris and Rome's large public debts as a key concern.

The newspaper also reports that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and French President Emmanuel Macron aim to take a leading role in EU negotiations with the United States. However, the proposal for a new support package, put forward by the EU's diplomacy chief, Kaja Kallas, appears to contradict this ambition.

In an interview published on Tuesday, the Ukrainian president said that he would be willing to sit at the negotiating table with his Russian counterpart, if that was the only to "bring peace to the citizens of Ukraine and not lose people."