Zelensky hopes Swiss summit on peace blueprint takes place in spring

The aftermath of a shelling in downtown Donetsk, Ukraine, on February 20. A woman was killed and dozens were injured. KEYSTONE

Ukraine is hoping for a peace summit organised by Switzerland as early as this spring. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says a peace plan is to be drawn up with Ukraine’s partners, which will then be presented to Russia.

His country must not lose the diplomatic initiative, Zelensky said in Kyiv at a media conference to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It was only on Friday that Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis announced at the UN headquarters in New York that Switzerland intended to organise a high-level peace conference by the summer. This conference should be a prelude and initiate a process, he said, adding that it was important that a broad alliance of states was represented at the conference – not only Europe, the US and Canada, but also states from other regions of the world.

+ Switzerland aims to hold Ukraine peace conference ‘by the summer’

Zelensky said in Kyiv: “We will propose a platform on which [Russian President Vladimir Putin] can accept that he lost this war and that it was a big mistake and a tragedy for us and for the democratic world.”

Ukraine cannot afford to lose the war against Russia, because that would mean that Ukraine would cease to exist, Zelensky emphasised.

However, this is precisely the goal of the Russian president. He described the collapse of the Soviet Union, to which Ukraine once belonged, as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

Putin denies Ukraine the right to an independent state existence, also because, according to his argument, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians form a single East Slavic nation in Belarus. The West, in turn, wants to take control of Ukraine by linking it to the EU and NATO, thereby harming Russia.

At dawn on February 24, 2022, Russia militarily invaded its southern neighbour Ukraine on Putin’s orders. Contrary to Russian expectations, neither the capital Kyiv was taken within a few days, nor were Zelensky and his government liquidated or most of the country occupied. Instead, Russian troops were driven out of half of the occupied Ukrainian territories.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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