KYIV: Ukraine sees a window of opportunity for US mediation to end Russia's war in Ukraine until the end of next summer and has drafted one page of ideas with US and European officials to be presented to Moscow, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Zelensky said that a ceasefire and a previously discussed US proposal for a free economic zone in Ukraine's eastern Donbas area — to be administered by a third party — were among the ideas in the document. "It contains one of the ideas for a ceasefire - that is the main point. The second part concerns what the Americans proposed regarding a free economic zone," Zelensky told reporters in a weekend briefing.
Ukraine has recently received a small number of US-made Patriot interceptors capable of downing Russian ballistic missiles, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday. The country also got confirmation of future supplies of the French Crotale surface-to-air missile system, the president was quoted as saying by broadcaster Suspilne. He did not say how many had arrived, or who had supplied them.
The Kremlin on Tuesday questioned the feasibility of the US idea to create a free economic zone in Donbas, saying the territory was formally part of Russia and that it was therefore unlikely that a third party could manage it. Russia has claimed four Ukrainian regions as its own, despite not controlling them fully. Moscow has repeatedly said that any solution must involve Ukraine fully ceding the four regions as well as resolving the conflict's "root causes."
Zelensky said that he saw a window to end the nearly four-and-a-half years of fighting that stretched from the G20 summit in the US in December this year until the end of summer 2027, given the looming campaign for the 2028 presidential election in the US. Zelensky said earlier this month that Ukraine had handed proposals to US negotiators for a plan to end the war, without providing more detail.
US-led peace talks fell apart earlier this year as Ukraine refused Russian demands to cede more territory and as Washington became increasingly preoccupied with the conflict with Iran. US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were last in Moscow in January and have not yet visited Kyiv.
Zelensky said the third element in the draft proposal was the role that the European Union and Nato would play and what "Ukraine is prepared to do to achieve this". He did not elaborate further. "These three ideas I've mentioned are not exclusively Ukrainian ideas," Zelensky said, adding they were developed jointly with the Americans and the Europeans, with some stemming from previous talks US negotiators had with Ukraine and Russia.
Russia was open to listening to new proposals on how to reach a settlement on the Ukraine conflict, but they should reflect the "realities on the ground", a senior Russian diplomat said in an interview published last week. Moscow's key objective is capturing the remainder of Donbas, where it has been making a push to advance into Ukraine's so-called fortress belt of eastern cities.
Separately, a senior Vatican official urged an end to the Ukraine war after meeting in Moscow on Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the first in-person talks between Vatican and Russian officials in five years. Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican's foreign minister, said every day that the four-year Russia-Ukraine war continues, it "creates new victims... and renders future reconciliation ever more difficult."
"It is therefore urgent and necessary to end and to look beyond the conflict," he said, speaking next to Lavrov at a joint press conference following their meeting. He also said that he and Lavrov had discussed avenues towards peace in Ukraine and that the two had agreed to cooperate on humanitarian matters such as caring for children impacted by the war.
Gallagher, the Vatican's second-highest diplomatic official, had last visited Moscow for talks with Lavrov in 2021, before the start of the war.
Pope Leo has repeatedly called for an end to the conflict. — Reuters
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