Kissinger: Ukraine must give Russia territory
HENRY KISSINGER has urged Ukraine to “match the heroism they have shown with wisdom” and cede territory to Russia in order to strike a lasting peace deal.
The 98-year-old US statesman said the country should become a buffer zone between Russia and the West, and that a deal must be reached within weeks. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome,” Mr Kissinger said.
“Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”
It came as a Ukrainian intelligence chief said that Vladimir Putin survived an assassination attempt at the start of the war, and the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called for tougher sanctions against Russia.
A return to the pre-invasion lines would mean Ukraine agreeing to give Russia permanent control over Crimea and large parts of the south east, which Russia took in 2014. Such a move would be greeted with fury by Ukrainians.
Mr Kissinger, who has known Vladimir Putin for many years and was once described as “old friends” with him by a Kremlin spokesman, argued in 2014 that Ukraine should give up territory. Speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday, he said: “About eight years ago… I wrote an arti- cle in which I said the ideal outcome would be if Ukraine could be constituted as a neutral kind of state, as a bridge between Russia and Europe.
“I think that opportunity, it now does not exist in the same manner, but it could still be conceived as an ultimate objective in my view.”
Mr Zelensky told the conference that tougher sanctions were needed to crush Russia’s economy. “This is what sanctions should be: they should be maximum, so that Russia and every other potential aggressor that wants to wage a brutal war against its neighbour would clearly know the immediate consequences of their actions,” he said, adding that Ukraine had suffered more than £400 billion of damage.