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A third round of peace talks on Ukraine begins in Malta on Saturday.
Representatives from over 50 countries participate. Russia, which condemns the meeting as “blatantly anti-Russian”, will not come.
The peace talks in Malta will mainly deal with several main areas: food security, energy and nuclear security, humanitarian issues and restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak.
– This meeting is a powerful signal that unity remains around Ukraine, he said earlier this week.
The meeting organizers hope that the meeting will be able to arrive at a joint statement, which the two previous similar meetings held in Jidda and in Copenhagen this summer failed to achieve.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants this weekend’s meeting to lead to increased support for his plan to end the war. It calls on Russia to withdraw all its troops from Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including from Crimea, which Russia annexed back in 2014. Russia, which also claims the Ukrainian counties of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson as belonging to Russia, has rejected such a deal.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zacharova has dismissed this weekend’s two-day meeting as a “clearly anti-Russian event” that has nothing to do with trying to find a peaceful solution to the war.
– Such gatherings obviously have no perspective, these are simply counterproductive, she said on Thursday.