President Biden will skip a summit on the Ukraine war that will be held in Switzerland despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urging him to attend.
The summit will be held on June 15 and is being billed as a “peace summit,” but Russia has not been invited to attend. At previous summits, Zelensky has pushed his demands for peace talks, which include a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine and Ukrainian control of Crimea, which are non-starters for Moscow.
Instead of going to the summit, Biden will attend a fundraising event in California and is sending Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. “The vice president will reaffirm support for the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against ongoing Russian aggression,” a spokesperson for Harris said.
The spokesperson said Harris will “underscore the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to supporting Ukraine’s effort to secure a just and lasting peace.”
The US and its close allies have discouraged negotiations with Russia throughout the war, including talks that were held in March and April of 2022, when a real peace deal was on the table. According to Ukraine’s top negotiator at the time, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv in April 2022 and told the Ukrainians to keep fighting.
Today, the US maintains that it will not pressure Zelensky to negotiate even though his demands for peace are unrealistic and Ukrainian forces have no chance of winning on the battlefield.
Over the weekend, Zelensky made a rare trip to Asia to rally support for his war effort. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, he accused China of working with Russia to undermine the Switzerland summit.
“Today … unfortunately, regrettably, Russia is using Chinese influence on the region, using Chinese diplomats, also does everything to disrupt [the] peace summit,” Zelensky said. “This is unfortunate that such a big, independent, powerful country as China is an instrument in the hands of Putin.”
China has called for a ceasefire in Ukraine throughout the war and said it wouldn’t attend the summit because it didn’t believe the meeting would facilitate a peace deal since Russia was not invited.
Source: AntiWar.
