An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed Monday that there will be “no compromise” with Moscow to end the fighting in Ukraine and rejected the idea of a ceasefire.
Mykhailo Podolyak said the only “foundation for negotiations” could be Zelensky’s “peace formula,” which calls for a full Russian withdrawal before peace talks can happen.
“There can be no compromise positions such as ‘immediate ceasefires’ and ‘negotiations here and now’ that give Russia time to stay in the occupied territories,” Podolyak wrote on X, formally known as Twitter.
The comments came after a report from The Wall Street Journal suggested Kyiv might be softening its stance on peace talks. The report recapped talks on the war held in Saudi Arabia over the weekend that were attended by officials from 42 countries, including the US, Ukraine, and China.
The report said that at the summit, Ukraine did not “push again for its peace plan to be accepted” and did not “press the point” that all Russian troops must withdraw before peace talks could happen, which is a non-starter for negotiations with Moscow.
But Podolyak reaffirmed that Ukraine is opposed to negotiations. “Only the withdrawal of Russian troops to the 1991 border,” he said. A withdrawal to the 1991 borders would require Russia to leave Crimea, which it has controlled since 2014 and is populated by people who are happy they’re part of the Russian Federation.
Podolyak said there should be no “Minsk 3,” referring to the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements that were signed in an effort to end the civil war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region that was sparked following the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv. Under the Minsk accords, Kyiv agreed to cede some autonomy to the self-declared republics in the Donbas, and the regions would remain part of Ukraine, but they were never implemented.
The Minsk accords were brokered by France and Germany. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last year that the idea of the agreements was to “give Ukraine time” to buildup its military to prepare for a war with Russia. When asked about the comments, former French President François Hollande, who also brokered the Minsk agreements, said Merkel was “right on this point.”
“Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity,” Hollande said.
Source: AntiWar.
