The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, said in an interview released on Tuesday to be willing to hold direct conversations with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, along with other participants, to finish the war that began almost three years ago with the Russian invasion.
The interview was broadcast on Tuesday on the YouTube channel Piers Morgan Uncensored.
The return in January of Republican Donald Trump to the White House relaunched the speculation about peace conversations to end the Russian invasion initiated in February 2022.
An October 2022 decree even ruled out any negotiation while Putin was in power.
But Ukraine fights with difficulties against Russian troops, which advance in the east of the country. kyiv also fears that American help runs out, since Trump criticized this expense during his campaign.
Peace conversations remain hypothetical. There were still no concrete elements and the positions of Moscow and kyiv are still very remote.
Putin declared at the end of January that he was open to negotiate to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine, although he refused to hold direct conversations with Zelensky since he did not see “will” on his part.
If Zelensky “wants to participate in the negotiations, I will choose people to participate in the negotiations,” Putin said, qualifying the Ukrainian president as “illegitimate.”
Zelensky insists that any peace agreement includes security guarantees of Western powers for your country.
Russia, in turn, asks for the surrender of Ukraine and that the former Soviet republic renounces NATO. Moscow also asks to conserve the Ukrainian territories that claim to have annexed.
More than two years ago, proposals were made to establish a court that demanded accounts from Russia for its invasion.
But disputes on the legal basis of the court and how it would work have meant that progress in their establishment has been painfully slow.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House seems to have accelerated efforts, since European officials fear that their plans for a peace agreement can mean that Moscow escapes justice forever.
The EU said that the experts from 37 countries gathered in Brussels had “sitting the legal basis for the establishment of a special court for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.”
They also established the key elements of the legal text that would govern the operation of the court, said Brussels.
“When Russia decided to pass her tanks through the borders of Ukraine, violating the United Nations Charter, one of the most serious violations committed: the crime of aggression,” said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
“Now justice comes. Justice for Ukraine. ”
The EU Justice Commissioner, Michael McGrath, said that there is still some technical work to develop a final draft, but hopes that it will be completed in the near future.
While the conversations extended in the Court, in March 2023 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against the Russian president for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
But the Special Court is specifically destined to judge Russia for the “crime of aggression”, for which the ICC has no jurisdiction.
In an attempt to demand responsibilities to Russia, Ukrainian and international researchers have continued their efforts to document thousands of cases of abuse committed during the war.
kyiv states that he is investigating more than 140,000 cases of possible war crimes in the country.
In an related effort to try to make Russia pay for the damage he has caused in kyiv, the EU also proposed to join possible conversations about an “International Commission of Claims” for Ukraine.
With information from Infobae
