“I have set a goal that by November we will have a fully prepared plan” to be able to organize the next peace summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday, July 15, at a press conference in kyiv. But for the first time, he also assured that he wanted Moscow to be there, saying he thought “that Russian representatives should participate in this second summit.”
A first summit on peace in Ukraine was organized in mid-June in Switzerland, with several dozen countries represented, but Russia was not invited and China, Moscow’s ally and diplomatic heavyweight, decided not to participate. Since then, Volodymyr Zelensky has said he wants to present in November a “plan” for “a just peace”, after more than two years of a war that has caused hundreds of thousands of victims on the Ukrainian and Russian sides.
A plan on three key topics
The Ukrainian president did not mention the cessation of hostilities, but the establishment of “a plan” on three issues: the energy security of Ukraine, whose infrastructure has been ravaged by Russian bombings, free navigation in the Black Sea, a key issue for Ukrainian exports, and prisoner exchanges.
Russia still occupies nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory, and prospects for a ceasefire or even lasting peace between kyiv and Moscow remain minimal at this stage. However, this is the first time that Volodymyr Zelensky has floated the idea of talks with Russia without a prior Russian withdrawal from its territory. In the past, he has also vowed not to talk to Moscow as long as Vladimir Putin is in power and even signed a decree making negotiations with Moscow illegal.
Opposing Ukrainian and Russian positions
The positions of kyiv and Moscow, however, seem irreconcilable to this day. Ukraine, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, regularly claims to want to regain its sovereignty over all the territories occupied by its Russian neighbor, including the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014. kyiv has proposed a 10-point peace plan, supported by the West, involving the unconditional withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, or nearly 700,000 soldiers, according to figures presented by Vladimir Putin.
A proposal brushed aside by Moscow. The Russian president, who ordered his army to attack Ukraine in February 2022, has repeatedly repeated his “conditions”: the abandonment of the four regions that Moscow claims to annex in addition to Crimea, and the assurance that kyiv renounces joining NATO. These demands have been brushed aside by kyiv and its Western supporters.
From the West to China, initial attempts at peace agreements have already failed
The West has repeatedly said it is up to Ukrainian officials to decide when they want to talk to Russia and under what conditions, and Zelensky said Monday that he “does not think we are being pushed” to negotiate. The possibility of negotiations is “something that has been discussed with them,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday, while stressing that it was up to Ukraine to decide. “If they want to invite Russia to the summit, we will support them,” he added, but noted that Russia has shown no signs of seeking a diplomatic solution to the conflict so far.
The outcome of the presidential election in the United States, Ukraine’s main ally, could play a major role in how the conflict unfolds. Republican Donald Trump, who has praised Vladimir Putin’s policies in the past, has promised to end the war within weeks if elected in early November, raising concerns that he could cut U.S. aid.
In the early weeks of the Russian invasion in 2022, Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Belarus and then in Turkey to try to reach a peace agreement. However, these attempts failed, with Russia since claiming that it was the West that had caused the discussions to fail. In February 2023, China, Russia’s ally, presented its own peace plan for Ukraine, but Moscow and kyiv did not seize on it to restart the discussions.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Kremlin’s privileged interlocutor in the European Union, was in kyiv and then Moscow at the beginning of July in the hope of making progress, but he attracted the wrath of his European counterparts for his trip, especially since he called on kyiv for a ceasefire.