Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky opened the door to peace talks with Russia for the first time on Monday, saying he would welcome Moscow’s presence at an upcoming peace 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, an ally of Moscow and a 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 nearly two and a half years of a war which has caused hundreds of thousands of victims on the Ukrainian and Russian sides.
“I have set a goal that by November we will have a fully prepared plan” to be able to organize the summit, he said on Monday at a press conference in kyiv.
But for the first time, he also assured that he wanted Moscow to be present: “I think that Russian representatives should participate in this second summit,” he announced.
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 bombing, free navigation in the Black Sea, a key issue for Ukrainian exports, and prisoner exchanges.
Russia still occupies nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory and the prospects for a ceasefire, or even lasting peace between kyiv and Moscow, remain minimal at this stage.
This is the first time, however, that Volodymyr Zelensky has raised the idea of talks with Russia without a prior Russian withdrawal from its territory.
In the past, he had also vowed not to negotiate with Moscow as long as Russian President Vladimir Putin was in power and even signed a decree making negotiations with Moscow illegal.
Irreconcilable positions
However, the positions between kyiv and Moscow 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, nearly 700,000 troops, according to figures presented by Vladimir Putin. A proposal dismissed by Moscow.
The Kremlin strongman, who ordered his army’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, has for his part 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 were brushed aside by kyiv and its Western backers.
The West, for its part, repeats that it is up to Ukrainian officials to decide when they want to discuss with Russia and under what conditions, and Volodymyr Zelensky assured Monday that he “does not think that we are being pushed” to negotiate.
But the outcome of the presidential election in the United States, Ukraine’s main ally, could play a significant 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 first 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.
These attempts, however, failed, with Russia since claiming that it was the West who had caused the discussions to fail.
In February 2023, China, an ally of Russia, presented its own peace plan for Ukraine, without Moscow and kyiv seizing on it to resume discussions.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Kremlin’s privileged interlocutor in the European Union, was in kyiv at the beginning of July, then Moscow, in the hope of making progress, but he attracted the wrath of his European counterparts in response for his trip, especially since he called on kyiv for a ceasefire.