US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
All of this is you speculating what Ukrainian citizens want and what they don’t want out of a negotiated peace.
For example, regarding Russian as the official language, in some eastern regions of what was Ukraine up to 2013, such as Crimea, Donets and Lugansk, there was a majority of people who considered themselves ethnically Russian. After the annexation of Crimea by Russia, many of these people wanted an independence referendum, quite parallel to Catalonia but regarding annexation to Russia. This was antidemocratically forbidden by the central government in a clear violation of the human right to self-determination, and instead in these regions, which formerly had the possibility to access public education in Russian, this stopped being the case and Ukrainian became the only language in which people could attain an education.
This doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think I’m in a position to criticize negotiation attempts when a vast majority of Ukrainians desire it, without knowing exactly what they would be willing to give up in exchange.