UKRAINE. Ukraine’s foreign minister has said he wants to hold a peace summit at the UN at the end of February 2023, but has set a major condition for kyiv to accept Russia’s presence there.
After more than 10 months of war, the head of Ukrainian diplomacy is considering a peaceful outcome to the conflict, but lays down a major condition. In an interview granted to the American agency Associated Press on Monday December 26, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, declared that he wanted to organize a summit for peace supervised by the United Nations at the end of February 2023, which would be held at the UN headquarters in New York. But he sets a condition for Ukraine to accept Russia’s presence at this summit: that Moscow agrees to be prosecuted for war crimes before an international tribunal.
“Put everyone around a table”
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has multiplied calls to put in place “a plan for peace” in recent days. His foreign minister said in his interview with the Associated Press: “We are aiming for the end of Februarywhen the war will enter its second year.” He was, however, intransigent about the condition imposed by theUkraine to bring Russians to justice for war crimes: “They will only be invited to participate on this condition.”
The head of Ukrainian diplomacy believes that the UN headquarters in New York would be the ideal place to hold such an event: “We think that the United Nations would be the best place to organize it, because it is not a question of distinguishing this or that country. It is above all to put everyone around a table, and there is no better place for that than the UN.” He also sees in Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, “an effective mediator and an effective negotiator”, but also “a man of principles and honest”.
Any chance of succeeding?
On Sunday, December 25, Vladimir Putin said in a televised address that the Russians were “ready to negotiate acceptable solutions with all the actors involved, but it depends on them”. “It is not us who refuse to negotiate, it is them”, added the Russian president. “We must not allow the Russia of manipulating the conclusion of peacebecause they regularly say that they are ready to negotiate, which is not true since everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite,” said Dmytro Kuleba, appearing to refer to the comments of the ruler of the Kremlin.
If the announcement of this planned peace summit therefore revives a little hope among the Ukrainians, the conflict doesn’t seem ready to stop in the coming weeks, as the Foreign Minister in kyiv insisted: “Any war ends diplomatically. Any war ends because of actions on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. But the balance of what will be won on the battlefield and at the table remains to be found“.