Volodymyr Zelensky wants to have Ukraine’s proposal to Russia to end the war ready by the end of this year. The Ukrainian president said on June 16, during the Peace Summit in Switzerland, that the next and final summit with his allies should be held “in a matter of months, not years.” The document that third countries, on behalf of Ukraine, will present to President Vladimir Putin for negotiations is to emerge from this second meeting. Zelensky’s right-hand man, Andrii Yermak, confirmed this on June 25 in the magazine Time The aim is for the conference to agree on the final proposal to be held before the end of this year in Saudi Arabia.
Igor Zhovkva, a member of the Yermak team, indicated to the Interfax agency on June 21 that there are three reasons to hurry: the first is that “no one wants peace more than Ukraine as soon as possible”; The second is that the multinational work to specify each of the 10 points of Zelensky’s proposal is advancing rapidly; The third reason is the presidential elections in the United States next November. As Zhovkva acknowledged, everyone is watching these elections and, above all, a possible victory for Republican Donald Trump, who is openly opposed to continuing economic and military aid to Ukraine. Yermak added that the war in Gaza has further complicated the global geopolitical situation.
The Trump Factor
Trump has a plan on the table to end the war, the candidate’s two advisers who developed it, Keith Kellog and Fred Fleitz, explained to Reuters on Tuesday. This document states that Ukraine must be required to open dialogue with Russia if it wants to continue receiving American weapons. And Moscow, according to the plan, will be asked to agree to negotiate with kyiv because, if not, the White House will increase military support for Ukraine.
Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podoliak told the same agency that the Trump team’s plan is “strange” because it legitimizes the violation of international law and does not contemplate Russia paying compensation for the destruction caused.
The Swiss Foreign Minister, Ignazio Cassis, ventured on June 16 that the most practical thing would be for the second summit to be held before the US presidential elections. Yet not everybody thinks like this. Mijaílo Gonchar, one of Ukraine’s most senior defense policy advisors, president of the Strategy XXI geopolitical study center, assured this newspaper on June 24 that the ideal month to present the peace proposal is December: “Before November , in the middle of the US elections, could seem like a pressure operation on Joe Biden; In December the elections will have passed, it will be known who the new president is, who will not have taken office yet.” Gonchar, close to the Swiss peace summit negotiations, emphasizes that the main pressure to start talks as soon as possible comes from the European powers.
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The 10 points of Zelensky’s so-called Peace Formula are the basis of the summit held in Switzerland with the participation of a hundred governments. 89 countries signed the joint statement of the meeting supporting Zelensky’s theses. In Ukraine, there has been an intense debate about whether the summit was positive. Media opposed to the president have been critical of the lack of significant support from the so-called Global South, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Saudi Arabia and most notably, China, Russia’s main diplomatic supporter.
Negotiate directly through third parties
The work scheme of Zelensky’s Peace Formula assumes that 10 governments develop the content of the 10 points to obtain the maximum possible number of States that support it. It remains to be determined how the final document will be presented to Russia, but the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmitro Kuleba, noted on June 21 in state news that the model will be similar to the one that managed to launch the so-called Grain Initiative in 2022. the export of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea ports under the inspection of the Russian fleet. Russia broke the pact a year later, but Kuleba pointed out that it is the way: “We have a positive experience, the grain initiative. Ukraine negotiated with Türkiye and the UN, and Türkiye and the UN with Russia. The document was signed between Türkiye, the UN and Ukraine, and between Turkey, the UN and Russia.”
Yermak, along with Zelensky the most influential politician in Ukraine, instead assured that time that the final scenario must be Ukrainians and Russians sitting at the same table to seal the deal.
The Kremlin considers Zelensky’s Peace Formula unacceptable because it does not intend to return a single square meter of the territories occupied by force since 2014. Ukraine does not plan to give up even an iota of its sovereignty, not even in the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed in 2014 and which Russia considers an inalienable part of its national identity. This week, a meeting of the Crimean Platform, an organization founded by Zelensky in 2021, was held in Kiev, “precisely when Crimea was nowhere to be found in negotiations with Russia,” Maria Tomak, head of the Crimean Platform office, explained to this newspaper: “The Platform was set up precisely to make it clear that Crimea will not be a bargaining chip.”
A report this spring by defense experts from the Crimean Platform asserts that liberating the peninsula is critical to the outcome of the war and even to Russia’s future: “Crimea was a key launching point of Russian aggression. “Crimea remains the center of gravity of the war and its liberation will block Russia’s war efforts and may trigger the collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
Refat Chubarov, the chairman of the Crimean Tatar People’s Council, insisted at the Kiev conference that military experts are convinced that it is possible to isolate Russian troops in Crimea and cut off the invader’s logistical supply in southern Ukraine. A diplomatic representative of an EU country on the Black Sea, who asked not to be identified, explained to EL PAÍS that one of the priorities of his presence at the Crimean Platform conferences was to gather information on the real possibility of expelling the invader from the peninsula. The Ukrainian authorities are trying to convince NATO that Russia’s withdrawal from Crimea will bring stability to the entire Black Sea.
Independent voices within Ukraine are also beginning to question the realism of some of these proposals. Anatolii Arnelin, founder of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, published a short essay on June 22 in Espresso in which he concluded that the best option for all parties involved in the war is to freeze the conflict, first ensuring Ukraine’s access to the Sea of Azov and tripling its military potential. Arnelin estimated that the time for the front to freeze could be between next fall and spring of 2025, depending on the US presidential elections.
Arnelin considered that Zelensky’s peace formula has little chance of succeeding “because it is a defeat for Russia that neither the Russians nor the United States want.” Mikola Bielieskov, researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, an organization dependent on the Ukrainian presidency, summarized in June to EL PAÍS that Washington, above all, does not want to bring the war to worse scenarios of global instability: “The United States follows the old doctrine of “Russia cannot win this war, but neither can it lose it.”
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