KYIV — US President Donald Trump spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week suggesting the separate calls, each lasting more than an hour, were kick starting peace talks.
AFP looks at where Moscow and Kyiv stand on negotiations that could end the nearly three-year war that has cost tens of thousands of lives.
Russia: the conflict’s ‘root causes’
During his call with Trump, Putin said that to end the war in Ukraine, the “root causes” of the conflict needed to be resolved.
This was an apparent reference to security demands that Moscow put to NATO and Washington in late 2021, weeks before launching the war.
Those demands envisaged sweeping changes to Europe’s security architecture, including the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from former Soviet countries and eastern bloc members, including the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria, which are all NATO and EU members.
Russia also demanded a commitment from NATO that it would not offer membership to any other ex-Soviet nations, including Ukraine, or conduct military operations on former USSR territory.
The Kremlin, since invading, has ruled out the idea of swapping territory in Russia controlled by Ukraine for Ukrainian territory controlled by its army.
Moscow says that any agreement to end the conflict must reflect the “new realities on the ground,” referring to its annexation of four southern and eastern Ukrainian territories in 2022, as well as its 2014 seizure of Crimea.
It has also ruled out direct talks with Zelensky, claiming that his presidential term ended last year. Under martial law imposed after the invasion, Zelensky remains leader and is internationally recognised as such.
Putin has praised US President Donald Trump, voiced readiness to meet with him and even suggested the war would not have started were Trump in the White House in 2022.
Ukraine: ‘a just peace’
President Volodymyr Zelensky wants the war to end as soon as possible and for Ukraine to get security guarantees that would deter future Russian attacks, like NATO membership or a large-scale foreign peacekeeping contingent.
He has said that talks should include Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the European Union, since Kyiv, currently a candidate, hopes to join the bloc.
Kyiv is refusing to cede territory to Russia but Zelensky has conceded that Ukraine may only be able to reclaim some territories later through diplomacy.
He has sought to rally allies around the Ukrainian vision for ending the war through two documents, the Peace Formula and the Victory Plan. He has said that talks excluding Kyiv will fail.
Ukraine captured swathes of Russia’s border region of Kursk last August and says the territory will be an important bargaining chip in any talks. Earlier this week he explicitly floated the idea of relinquishing it in exchange for some Russian-held territory in Ukraine.
He had previously said that a complete withdrawal of Russian troops would be a precondition for talks and that only a “just peace” can permanently end the war.
Background
Kyiv does not trust that Russia will keep up its end of any deal without oversight, pointing to several previous pacts.
In July 2022, Moscow and Kyiv signed agreements with Turkey and the United Nations allowing Ukraine to bypass a Russian naval blockade in the Black Sea to export grain.
The Kremlin unilaterally ended the deal one year later, complaining that its calls for sanctions relief were ignored.
This week’s talks in Munich come a decade after France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia attempted to broker a peace agreement in the capital of Belarus to end fighting between Kremlin-backed separatist forces and Kyiv.
Those fragile accords gave Russian-supported separatists de facto control over swathes of eastern Ukraine, which Kyiv says gave Russia time to build up its military to launch the full-scale invasion of 2022.
