The fourth Summit of the Council of Europe held in May 22 in Reykjavik has approved a final resolution expressing political support for Ukraine’s Peace Formula. An EU summit dedicated to promoting Ukraine’s Peace Formula is scheduled for mid-July in Copenhagen.
In her speech, the President of the European Commission emphasised that the basis of peace in Ukraine should be the establishment of justice, which requires listening to Ukraine’s opinion. From this, she concluded that it is necessary to support the path to peace offered by Ukraine – the so-called ’Zelenskyy peace formula’. Von der Leyen urged everyone to join forces.
The attempts of China to be recognized as a mediator between the sides of the war cannot be left unnoticed. President of Ukraine and his team began talks with China in late spring to discuss how they could cooperate to establish a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, based on the principles of international law and respect for the UN Charter.
The head of the Chinese MoD recently said his country was taking an impartial stance on the crisis in Ukraine, and pledged to make efforts to build a common understanding in the international community of its regulation. ’Ukraine is ready to accept China as a mediator in the negotiation process only if Beijing manages to force Moscow to withdraw its troops from all the Ukrainian territories that it has seized’, the head of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview early June, what can be seen as a response to the proposal of his Chinese counterpart.
Apart from the Chinese peace-making initiative, there is another considerable angle as for peace attempts which should be mentioned. Pope Francis’ special peace envoy, ’a messenger of the Holy Father’ Italian cardinal Matteo Zuppi went to Kyiv to hold talks with the Ukrainian authorities on the war, and how to defuse tensions, and achieve a just peace.
Pope Francis’ peace mission was revealed after his trip to Hungary in April. The Ukrainian authorities initially denied a papal peacekeeping mission, but considerable steps were taken some days later: Kyiv also sent its envoys to the Vatican, and Russia’s high-ranking clerics also held talks with representatives of the Holy See.
Based on the above, I would say that a kind of a political will had already started to form in the international community to reach a ceasefire, but then came the tragic 6th of June. The destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, which, among others, supplies water to the annexed Crimea clearly shows that at least one side of the war is not interested in negotiations.
After such a major incident, which led not only to personal tragedy for thousands of people who did not want this war, but also to an ecological catastrophe as well, not to mention the unforeseeable consequences for agriculture, to speak about peace talks may seem naive and unrealistic. All attempts to establish peace, such as the visit of the special envoy of the Pope to Kyiv have been in vain. They have led nowhere. Escalation benefits all sides. That’s why the Nord Stream gas pipelines were demolished, the Kakhovka dam was damaged, and attacks are carried out in the Belgorod Region of the Russian Federation. All these provocations could lead to an escalation. It is clear that by the 16th month of the war, unfortunately, there is no chance of peace.
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