Kyiv (Ukraine) (AFP) – Russia and Ukraine will hold US-brokered talks on February 17-18 in Geneva, both countries said Friday, announcing the next leg in fraught negotiations seeking to end the four-year war. US President Donald Trump is pushing to end the conflict, unleashed when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, but two previous rounds of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi have not yielded any signs of a breakthrough. Both sides said publicly the discussions were productive, but Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on the key issue of territory.
“The next round of talks on the Ukrainian settlement will be held in the same trilateral Russia-US-Ukraine format, on February 17–18 in Geneva,” Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying. Peskov said Moscow’s delegation to Geneva will be headed by Vladimir Medinsky, a hawkish ex-culture minister who led previous failed talks in Turkey, in a switch from the senior military officials who led two previous rounds in Abu Dhabi. Kyiv confirmed the talks were set for the scenic Swiss city. “The Ukrainian delegation has already begun preparing for this meeting,” said its top negotiator Rustem Umerov, head of Ukraine’s National Security Council. He will be joined by Zelensky’s chief of staff and former spy master, Kyrylo Budanov, and a host of other officials. Russia’s switch of negotiating teams comes after an assassination attempt on the deputy of its top negotiator in Moscow earlier this month — an attack it said was orchestrated by Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday arrived in Munich to hold rounds of meetings with European and US officials, seeking support from allies ahead of the talks. He also toured a Ukrainian-German drone production facility. Russia has continued to batter Ukrainian cities in recent days, killing six people across the country in overnight strikes that targeted the southern port city of Odesa and energy infrastructure. Moscow has stuck to its demands in the talks for sweeping territorial and political concessions from Ukraine — rejected by Kyiv as tantamount to capitulation.
Russia is pushing for Ukraine to pull out of the eastern Donetsk region — around one-fifth of which Kyiv’s forces still control. Ukraine has rejected a unilateral pull-back and wants robust Western security guarantees to deter Russia from re-launching its offensive following any ceasefire. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the four-year conflict, Europe’s deadliest since World War II. Russia occupies around one-fifth of Ukrainian land — including the Crimean peninsula it seized in 2014 — and areas that Moscow-backed separatists had taken prior to the 2022 invasion.
© 2024 AFP
