High-level delegations from the U.S. and Russia held talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday over the fate of Ukraine, the negotiations taking place without Kyiv’s participation.
The State Department said the talks were aimed to discuss ending the three-year-long war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022 and followed sustained cross-border aggression from Moscow since 2014.
Tuesday’s meeting in Riyadh concluded after around five hours, according to the press pool covering the meeting, with the State Department saying the discussions represented “an important step forward” toward “enduring peace.”
Rubio said that the U.S. and Russians agreed on four principles during their meeting as they start the initial steps toward a deal.
First, he said the U.S. and Moscow will work to reestablish their respective diplomatic missions in each other’s countries so they can move forward with more communication.
Second, Rubio said the U.S. will appoint a high-level team to help negotiate, and third, they will begin to discuss geopolitical and economic cooperation that could help resolve the conflict.
Fourth, he said that the five people who were involved in the first meeting will remain engaged, so they know it is moving along ‘in a productive way.’
All of that is great.
We are now in a far better position than we were under the Biden administration.
But the truth is that the two sides are still miles apart on what an end to the war in Ukraine will look like.
After the meeting, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce explained that the ultimate goal will be to come up with an agreement that will be “acceptable to all sides”…
A deal that will be “acceptable to all sides” certainly sounds good, but from my perspective it will be nearly impossible to achieve.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy doesn’t seem to understand that he is losing the war. He has been steadily losing territory and any rational leader in his position would be quite eager to go to the negotiating table. But instead, he is greatly upset that the U.S. would dare to talk to the Russians, and he is pledging to never “accept Russia’s ultimatums”…
‘I wonder why they believe Ukraine would accept all these ultimatums now if we refused them at the most difficult moment,’ the Ukrainian President said, referring to Kyiv’s refusal to bow to Moscow’s demands during crisis talks at the start of the war.
‘As President of Ukraine, I have never given any guarantees to anyone or confirmed anything. Moreover, I have never intended to accept Russia’s ultimatums. And I am not going to,’ Zelensky said.
After the meeting, the Russians issued their own set of demands as the negotiations move forward.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that NATO membership for Ukraine is unacceptable to Moscow.
She added: ‘It is worth noting that a refusal to accept Kyiv into NATO is not enough. The alliance must disavow the Bucharest promises of 2008.’
How in the world will those two positions be bridged?
I honestly have no idea.
Even more sticky is the matter of captured territory.
The Ukrainians are freaking out because the Russians may be allowed “to keep some of the 20% of Ukraine it has occupied”…
The Russians are winning the war, and they have been steadily capturing more territory in recent months.
Why would they give that territory back?
1 comment:
Why do you never talk about Russia only wants to keep the breakaway states? that did not want to remain part of Ukraine because most of them speak Russian. Why do you never talk about the 14,000 Russian speaking people in the breakaway states that were killed by the rest of Ukraine before 2022? What was the Minsk agreement? Why do you only tell a fraction of the truth? I have reserved a seat next to me in hell for people like you.
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