It is “not fair” that U.S. President Donald Trump more often calls on Ukraine to compromise to achieve peace than Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky said amid “difficult” two-day peace talks in Switzerland.
Two-day Ukraine War peace talks broke abruptly and apparently early on Wednesday morning, the second day’s session having lasted just two hours, amid remarks from both sides about how arduous progress had been so far. And even as the Ukrainian leader observed that he saw what could be a “final stage” in talks, he decried Russia for trying to further “drag out” progress and the United States for what he was was unfairly calling on Kyiv to do more for peace than Moscow.
President Volodymyr Zelensky made the remarks on Tuesday as the first session of this week’s trilateral peace talks got underway in Geneva, Switzerland, reports Axios, which states he said it is “not fair” that President Trump called on Ukraine to make concessions and not Russia. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian leader conceded that it was a different story behind closed doors, it was reported, and that there was “respect” with U.S. negotiators.
As previously reported, Ukraine and the U.S. appear to have come to an agreement that any peace deal likely to work would require from Ukraine concessions considerable enough to need a referendum of its people. Zelensky himself in this conversation is said to have stated that to get the outcome in that referendum Washington wants, he will need to sell a story to the Ukrainian people of the country coming out of the conflict a victor, or at the very least not a loser.
Ukraine conceding to Russia’s demands and simply handing over the remaining fraction of the Donbas region is still controls to Moscow would be seen as an “unsuccessful story” to the Ukrainian people, he said. Zelensky is said to have remarked of this: “Emotionally, people will never forgive this. Never. They will not forgive… me, they will not forgive [the U.S.]”. A ceasefire where Ukrainian soldiers stick to the front line they’d fought to and don’t have to fall back would be more agreeable to the Ukrainian people, he is reported to have said.
That the two-day peace talks this week finished so abruptly on Wednesday may imply that progress towards a settlement that satisfies all parties remains glacial. Ukraine’s negotiator Rustem Umerov called talks as they roke on Wednesday “intense and substantive” but with progress evident, while his Russian counterpart Vladimir Medinsky called them “difficult, but businesslike”.
President Zelensky himself said “We can see that some groundwork has been done, but for now the positions differ, because the negotiations were not easy” on Wednesday.
Earlier, both parties called them “very tense”.
This week’s talks are the third round of trilateral negotiations where delegations from Ukraine, Russia, and the United States sit in the same room and talk directly, rather than through mediators. It is possibly also the first time such talks have directly involved multilateral discussions involving delegations from “United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland”.
Given Russia’s objections to European involvement in the peace process and any ceasefire that follows, it is unclear whether Russia was present in those broader multilateral talks this week or just the trilaterals.
Read the full article here