President Volodymyr Zelensky in late Monday comments dug in his heels on key issues slowing down the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, saying said Kyiv will never agree to a territory turnover to Moscow, and that Ukraine must have iron-clad security guarantees before it would agree to a ceasefire.
The Ukrainian leader made the comments, later aired by the Presidential Administration office, during a meeting with selected members of the Kyiv press corps.
Zelensky said he fully understands that NATO’s “open door” policy is in fact a fiction, and that Ukraine is prepared to consider rejection of a NATO membership plan and geopolitical neutrality – two of several demands laid down by Russian President Vladimir Putin as preconditions for peace.
“Ukraine is not being invited into NATO because they (NATO states) are afraid of Russia. Ukraine needs to accept this and seek other security guarantees,” he said.
Zelensky called on Putin to agree to a face-to-face meeting, because without the direct involvement of the Ukrainian and Russian Federation (RF) national leaders, the ceasefire talks will fail and fighting between the two countries will continue.
“At a meeting with Putin I am ready to hear out everything that Russia is displeased with and I will tell him everything that the Ukrainian people think. We (Putin and Zelensky) cannot resolve all the issues, but there is a chance that we might, and we could at least stop the war,” he said.
Ukraine will never agree to any ceasefire deal that leaves the country under risk of a repeat invasion, he said.
A complicating factor in the negotiations process, Zelensky said, is the fact that Ukraine is a democracy. He said that even were Ukrainian national leadership to consider rejecting a NATO path and geopolitical neutrality, a treaty with those conditions could not go into effect until Ukraine changed its constitution – meaning either super-majority support of the measures in parliament, or a national referendum.
Zelensky said other RF demands like Kyiv’s acceptance of Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea, and the recognition of the RF-sponsored Donbas “republic”, likewise can only be approved, on the Ukrainian side, by a national referendum and amendments to the constitution.
In an Monday interview with British BBC, Zelensky adviser Mihailo Podolyak reiterated the Ukrainian baseline negotiating position of “territorial integrity, sovereignty and real security guarantees.”
He described the negotiations with RF representatives as “difficult”. He said at present working groups were discussing terms for a number of separate issues, and that so far the delegations are nowhere near a single draft document with a clear road map to a ceasefire or peace.
Podolyak said that frequent declarations by senior US and NATO officials that Brussels and Washington under no circumstances would intervene with troops in the Russia-Ukraine war, as the negotiation process continues, are encouraging the Kremlin to a more intransigent negotiating positions and renewed aggression.
He said he could not predict when the talks might produce an actual ceasefire agreement: “I am not prepared to say, that the war will end one or two days. Even from the point of view of needing to calm people down. No. But I can say, that we (Ukraine) will fight, as long as necessary.”
