Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has stressed that a “political solution” to the war in Ukraine will only be attainable once all of the preconditions set out by Vladimir Putin last year are met.
Asked by a Sky News reporter at a press conference in Moscow on Monday whether Putin’s war in Ukraine would be considered “a success or a failure” once a peace deal was eventually reached, Ryabkov replied that Moscow envisaged peace in Ukraine only “through full implementation” of the demands set out by Putin on the eve of the first Ukraine peace summit in June.
“The sooner the US, the UK and others understand this … the closer this desired political solution will be for everyone,” Ryabkov added.
Dismissed by Kyiv at the time as “a complete sham”, Putin’s preconditions for a peace deal read far more like a wishlist than a serious basis for a negotiated peace. They include the withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from the entirety of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which despite being unilaterally annexed by Russia in 2022, have never been fully under Moscow’s control; a declaration by Kyiv to be neutral, non-aligned, non-nuclear, demilitarised and “denazified”, as well as the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia.
However, since the return of Donald Trump to the White House last month, a peace deal on terms unfavourable to Kyiv has become a far more realistic prospect, given the US president’s campaign pledge to end the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible and his indifference to Ukrainian sovereignty.
In comments reported by The New York Post on Saturday, Trump said he had already spoken to Putin by phone to begin negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, although on Sunday the Kremlin would “neither confirm nor deny” that such a call took place.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that it was essential he meet Trump in person before the US president met with Putin, to avoid what he called “a dialogue about Ukraine without Ukraine”, while also indicating Ukraine’s readiness to supply some of its rare earth metals to the US, after Trump demanded Kyiv do so as a quid pro quo for continued US military support.