Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. will meet for peace talks in the United Arab Emirates today, Friday.
When Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. meet today, Friday, in the United Arab Emirates for a new round of peace talks, we should not get our hopes up for a deal that could bring long-term peace to the war-torn country.
Ahead of the meeting in the UAE, the U.S. delegation, including special envoy Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow on Thursday, talking to Kremlin officials for more than three hours.
According to CNN, however, the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, made it clear to the U.S. delegation that there will be no lasting agreement over Ukraine before the issue of territories is resolved.
“The main thing is that during these negotiations between our President and the Americans, it was once again stated that without resolving the territorial issue according to the formula agreed upon in Anchorage, one should not count on achieving a long-term settlement,” Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov told reporters on Friday, Reuters reported.
Talks and pressure
Before travelling to Moscow, Witkoff said negotiations were close to narrowing the gap.
“I think we’ve got it down to one issue, and we have discussed iterations of that issue, and that means it’s solvable,” he said at an event in Davos.
A European official later told CNN that the issue Witkoff referred to was territory.
Hundreds of thousands without heat
Russia has conducted a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter, leaving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without heat, with temperatures far below freezing.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that more than one million households in the capital, Kyiv, alone were without power following a massive Russian overnight strike.
The Financial Times cited unnamed officials as saying that the talks in the UAE will likely include a proposal for a ceasefire in strikes on energy infrastructure, but it is unlikely that either side would actually agree to it.
For Russia, the continued barrage on Ukrainian energy infrastructure is leverage that it is unlikely to give up. And as Ukraine has conducted successful long-range strikes on Russian energy infrastructure to cripple the Russian war economy, Ukraine will also be hesitant to agree to such a deal.
Sources: CNN, Reuters, AP, Financial Times
