PM travels to Switzerland for peace summit as Ukraine faces setbacks on the battlefield

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau heads to Switzerland today for a peace summit as Ukraine's president works to shore up his country's defence by securing more international support.

The Ukraine Peace Summit is unfolding at a time of extreme peril for Ukrainian troops on the battlefield. Russian gains have led to intense fighting northeast of Kharkiv. Russian drone and missile strikes have badly damaged the country's energy grid.

Ukraine's Ambassador to Canada Yuliya Kovaliv said more than 100 countries and organizations have confirmed they're coming to the conference. She said that shows «how many countries really understand what's at stake.»

«It's not only in Europe,» Kovaliv told CBC's on Friday. It's not only within the European Union or European continent. The consequences of this were very strongly felt in all all of the other parts of the world."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is holding the peace conference near Lake Lucerne immediately after the G7 summit in Italy, while many world leaders are in the region.

Zelenskyy is looking for more diplomatic buy-in at the conference for his 10-point peace formula, announced in 2022. Among other things, Zelenskyy's plan demands that Russia withdraw from all Ukrainian territory.

Russia was not invited to the summit and has dismissed the talks as meaningless. China, which has close ties to Russia, is also skipping the conference.

On the eve of the summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country would cease fire and enter peace talks if Ukraine dropped its NATO ambitions and withdrew its forces from four Ukrainian regions claimed by Moscow.

Ukraine's foreign ministry has rejected that proposal and called it «absurd» for Putin «who who planned, prepared and executed,