Diplomacy ‘only way to end war’
UKRAINE: ZELENSKY APPEALS FOR MORE MILITARY AID ‘There are things that can be reached at the negotiating table.’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned only a diplomatic breakthrough rather than an outright military victory can end Russia’s war on his country, while pushing its case for European Union (EU) membership.
Zelensky also appealed for more military aid, even as US President Joe Biden formally signed off on a $40 billion (about R630 billion) package of aid for the Ukrainian war effort.
That call came just hours after Russia claimed to have destroyed a cache of Western-delivered arms in the country’s northwest.
Zelensky also insisted his war-ravaged country should be a full candidate to join the EU, rejecting a suggestion from France’s President Emmanuel Macron and some other EU leaders that a sort of associated political community be created as a waiting zone for a membership bid.
“We don’t need such compromises,” Zelensky said on Saturday during a joint news conference with visiting Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa.
“Because, believe me, it will not be compromise with Ukraine in Europe, it will be another compromise between Europe and Russia.”
Zelensky, who will speak to the world’s political and business elite at the exclusive Davos forum via videolink today, told Ukrainians in a televised address: “There are things that can only be reached at the negotiating table.”
The war “will be bloody, there will be fighting but will only definitively end through diplomacy”.
“Discussions between Ukraine and Russia will decidedly take place. Under what format I don’t know,” he added.
But he promised that the result would be “fair” for Ukraine.
After just over 12 weeks of fierce fighting, Ukrainian forces have halted Russian attempts to seize Kyiv and the northern city of Kharkiv, but they are under intense pressure in the eastern Donbas region.
Moscow’s army has flattened and seized the Black Sea port of Mariupol and subjected Ukrainian troops and towns in the east to relentless ground and artillery attacks.
On Saturday, Russia’s defence ministry claimed to have destroyed a large stockpile of weapons supplied by the West in a cruise missile strike on the town of Malyn in the northwest Zhytomyr region.
“Long-range, high-precision Kalibr missiles, launched from the sea, destroyed a large consignment of weapons and military equipment supplied by the United States and European countries,” the ministry said. –