Ukraine’s foreign minister said his nation wants a UN-backed peace summit to end the war early in 2023, but only if Russia has faced a war crime tribunal first.
Dmytro Kuleba made the comments in a new interview, telling journalists the peace summit should be held by the end of February at the United Nations, with Secretary-General António Guterres as mediator.
This comes twenty-four hours after Putin said he is also ready for negotiation talks.
But Kuleba doesn’t anticipate Russia taking part, which makes it hard to foresee the devastating invasion ending soon.
‘Every war ends in a diplomatic way,’ the foreign minister said.
‘Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.’
Kuleba said that Russia must face a war crimes tribunal before his country directly talks with Moscow.
He suggested that a possible peace summit would take place at the United Nations with secretary-general Antonio Guterres as mediator of the talks.
The potential peace summit would take place a year after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022.
He said, however, that other nations should feel free to engage with Russians, as happened before a grain agreement between Turkey and Russia.
Ukraine’s top diplomat said during the interview at the Foreign Ministry that Ukraine will do whatever it can to win the war in 2023 — and that he was ‘absolutely satisfied’ with the results of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the US before Christmas, and revealed that the US government had made a special plan to get the Patriot missile battery ready to be operational in the country in less than six months.
Usually, the training takes up to a year.
Mr Kuleba said: ‘The United Nations could be the best venue for holding this summit because this is not about making a favour to a certain country.
‘This is really about bringing everyone on board.’
Mr Kuleba also said that if Russia were to be invited to the summit, it should first face prosecution for war crimes at an international court.
‘They can only be invited to this step in this way,’ he said.
The Ukrainian foreign minister also downplayed comments by Russian authorities that they are ready for negotiations, despite yesterday’s suggestion from Vladimir Putin that they were.
‘They regularly say that they are ready for negotiations, which is not true, because everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite,’ said Mr Kuleba.
