Russia’s Foreign Ministry rules out Moscow’s attendance of next Ukraine Peace Summit

Russia will not take part in a second Ukraine Peace Summit that Ukrainian President Volodymyyr Zelensky is planning for November, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Saturday.

Noting that the proposed peace summit had nothing to do with conflict resolution, Zakharova said that “Russia has not and will not participate” in such events. “This is yet another manifestation of the fraud of the Anglo-Saxons and their Ukrainian puppets. The so-called second summit has one goal: to push through the absolutely unviable ‘Zelensky formula’ as the only basis for resolving the conflict,” she said, adding that the formula’s objective was to “present Russia with an ultimatum on capitulation”.

Zakharova stressed that Moscow was “not giving up on a political and diplomatic settlement of the crisis” and was “ready to discuss serious proposals taking into account the situation on the ground”, the “emerging geopolitical realities” and the series of Russian preconditions for peace talks with Ukraine issued by Vladimir Putin in June.

While neither Russia nor China attended the first Ukraine Peace Summit convened by Zelensky in June, representatives from over 90 countries gathered in Switzerland to approve his 10-point peace plan, according to which Russia is required to withdraw from all occupied Ukrainian territory, to release all prisoners of war and to pay reparations to Kyiv.

Ukraine had been hoping that Russia would attend a second peace summit planned to take place ahead of the US presidential election in November, Bloomberg reported in July. However, Russian officials indicated at the time that Moscow would not participate in the summit, saying the country would not accept what it called the “ultimatums” set out in Zelensky’s peace plan.

Putin’s “preconditions” for peace talks with Ukraine, which include Ukrainian troops withdrawing from the entirety of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, despite the fact that Russian forces are not fully in control of any of them at present, were dismissed by senior Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak as “offensive to common sense”.

In return for ending the war, Putin has also demanded a written guarantee that the West would lift its sanctions on Russia as well as a Ukrainian commitment to be neutral, non-aligned, non-nuclear, demilitarised and “denazified”.