Even as talks progress and President Donald Trump says there is hope for a deal, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky made clear he rejects President Donald Trump’s proposal to recognise Russia’s occupation of Crimea as a price of peace, saying the Ukrainian constitution calls for nothing less than absolute victory.
This week, President Donald Trump said in interview with Time Magazine that one of the ultimate outcomes of the war will be that “Crimea will stay with Russia,” and later that a deal was close, with Ukraine and Russia needing now to meet in person in negotiations for the first time to “finish it off.”
Yet the rhetoric coming from Kyiv in recent days is far from complimentary about President Trump’s proposals. An American blueprint for peace in Ukraine was put before combatants this week and quickly rejected as politically impossible by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who cited the national constitution as making anything but total victory impossible.
The United States “offered its vision,” Zelensky said before leaving South Africa, stating Ukraine had made counter-proposals in return. Per Ukrainian state media, these included further calls for major Western military — as Ukraine has persistently asked for over the course of months — support including the deployment of “contingents” of foreign armed forces to the country for peacekeeping.
Also raised was Ukraine’s ultimate ask for peace: security guarantees in case of future Russian aggression, which it likens to NATO’s article five mutual defence clause.
“This document is on Trump’s desk,” and “we are awaiting a response,” Zelensky said, saying of the requests: “We want strong players among the security guarantors, those who have power.”
“Those who are not afraid of Russia and who have influence on Russia. Certainly, economic, certainly, historical. Of course, there should be the United States of America, of course, there should be Europe because we are in Europe.”
While the United States has baulked at the prospect of setting up a nuclear trigger in Ukraine, perhaps the greater stumbling block to achieving a workable peace agreement is President Zelensky’s insistence that he would do nothing in contradiction of the letter of the Ukrainian constitution.
While this is doubtless Zelensky’s sworn duty as President, given the constitution states the nation’s borders are “indivisible and inviolable,” this essentially locks him and Ukraine into pushing for a maximalist total victory, with every square yard of the nation’s United Nations-recognised territory liberated. Three years of brutal fighting and hundreds of thousands of lives have yet to achieve this goal.
President Zelensky said of this position that he would accept only a total defeat of the Russian invasion, a peace on unobtainable terms: “Anything that contradicts our values or our Constitution cannot be included in any agreements.”
“Our position is unchanged: only the Ukrainian people have the right to decide which territories are Ukrainian. The Constitution of Ukraine states that all temporarily occupied territories are temporarily occupied,” he continued. “They all belong to Ukraine, to the Ukrainian people. Ukraine will not legally recognize any temporarily occupied territories. I think this is an absolutely fair position. It is legal not only from the point of view of the Constitution of Ukraine, but also from the point of view of international law.”
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