Ukraine tries to revive its peace plan with a meeting in Saudi Arabia

The political and diplomatic front surrounding the war in Ukraine is advancing timidly after the NATO summit held this July in Lithuania. kyiv is facing a double track these days. On the one hand, with a meeting in Saudi Arabia on August 5 and 6, it tries to anchor support for its 10-point peace initiative, whose base is the withdrawal of all Russian troops from its territory, including the Crimean peninsula. On the other hand, the Zelenski government is specifying with the United States measures to support its security while waiting for Ukraine to join the Atlantic Alliance, something ruled out while the conflict derived from the Russian invasion is open.

Saudi Arabia will host a meeting in the city of Jeddah on the first weekend of August attended by some thirty countries to try to advance the peace formula championed by Zelenski, although the Ukrainian authorities have not specified that date. Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff and his shadow in almost all of his movements, reported on Sunday that this meeting is being prepared on the basis of the departure of Russian troops from Ukraine. He did not confirm the date, but he did speak of three phases that would culminate in a summit of heads of state and government.

After exposing the peace plan to the ambassadors accredited in Ukraine and having held a meeting in Denmark in June, this one with Saudi Arabia is the second of the phases, Zelensky’s chief of staff explained on Sunday during a trip the two made to the western Ivano-Frankivsk region.

The celebration of the meeting and the days were brought forward on Saturday by the newspaper The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Russia will not be among the participants, but other important states such as Brazil or India, which are not far from the postulates of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The objective is to strengthen the foundations so that a great peace summit can be held before the end of 2023, according to the American newspaper.

On the other hand, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Moscow, for its part, will maintain dialogue to end the invasion and the war in Ukraine with China, Brazil and several African partners, according to a statement from the official RIA news agency. of this Monday that quotes Reuters. The announcement comes after a summit held last week in Saint Petersburg between Russia and 49 African countries, although only 17 of them were represented by their head of state or government.

Ukraine affirms that the implementation of the decalogue for peace that President Volodimir Zelenski presented last November during the G-20 summit in Indonesia is being addressed almost weekly both in groups and individually with fifty countries, according to a statement from the Ukrainian presidency on Sunday. The implementation of this initiative “will make it possible not only to guarantee peace for Ukraine, but also to create mechanisms to counter future conflicts in the world,” Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential cabinet, said in words collected in that statement.

As for the talks that the Kiev government is holding with the US to provide some security framework for Ukraine, this is the first materialization after the commitment made by the G-7 at the NATO summit to give —not as a group , but with an individual negotiation of each State—protection to Ukraine in a context in which integration into the Alliance is not viable, among other reasons, due to the war situation it is experiencing. Those contacts with Washington are already taking place this week, according to Yermak. The guarantees of protection “will be in force until Ukraine becomes a member of NATO,” he wrote on the Telegram social network.

Meanwhile, the city of Krivói Rog (Dnipro region), where Zelensky is from, has been the scene of the latest Russian attack on civilian infrastructure. Two missiles hit an apartment building on Monday morning, killing at least two people, according to the Interior Ministry authorities. On the other hand, the authorities imposed by Moscow in the occupied Donetsk region reported that the Kremlin troops had expelled the local army from Staromayorske, a town that Kiev announced as recovered last Thursday. Moscow has also denounced new Ukrainian attacks on its territory, the last one this Monday against a Briansk police station, close to the border.

Crimea, under Russian control since 2014, is precisely one of the main focuses of attacks by the Ukrainian Security Forces in recent days. kyiv also does not forget to try to put pressure on Russia by also carrying out drone strikes in protected Moscow, as happened on Saturday, and in other border regions.

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