Kyiv won't give up land, says Zelensky
Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will meet in the far-north US state of Alaska, near Russia, on Aug 15, to try to resolve the three-year conflict, despite multiple warnings from Ukraine and Europe that Kyiv must be part of the negotiations.
Announcing the summit on Friday, Trump said that 'there'll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both' Ukraine and Russia, without providing further details.
'Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,' Zelensky said on social media hours later.
'Any decisions against us, any decisions without Ukraine, are also decisions against peace. They will achieve nothing,' he said, adding that the war 'cannot be ended without us, without Ukraine'.
Three rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine this year have failed to bear fruit, and it remains unclear whether a summit would bring peace any closer.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with millions forced to flee their homes.
Putin has resisted multiple calls from the United States, Europe and Kyiv for a ceasefire.
Zelensky said Kyiv was 'ready for real decisions that can bring peace' but said it should be a 'dignified peace', without giving details.
The former KGB officer in power in Russia for over 25 years has also ruled out holding talks with Zelensky at this stage.
Ukraine's leader has been pushing to make it a three-way summit and has frequently said meeting Putin is the only way to make progress towards peace.
Far away from war
The summit in Alaska, which Russia sold to the United States in 1867, would be the first between sitting US and Russian presidents since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021. This was just nine months before Moscow sent troops to Ukraine.
Zelensky said of the location that it is 'very far away from this war, which is raging on our land, against our people'.
The Kremlin said the choice was 'logical' because the state close to the Arctic is on the border between the two countries, and this is where their 'economic interests intersect'.
Moscow has also invited Trump to pay a reciprocal visit to Russia later.
Trump and Putin last sat together in 2019 at a G20 summit meeting in Japan during Trump's first term. They have spoken by telephone several times since January.
On Friday, Putin held a round of calls with allies, including China and India, in a diplomatic flurry ahead of the summit with Trump, who has spent his first months in office trying to broker peace in Ukraine without making a breakthrough.
The US president has earlier imposed an additional tariff on India for buying Russia's oil in a bid to nudge Moscow into talks. He also threatened to impose a similar tax on China, but so far has refrained from doing so.
Away from the talks, across the more than 1,000-kilometre frontline, Russia and Ukraine continued pouring dozens of drones on each other in an overnight exchange of attacks on Saturday.
As a result of that, a bus carrying civilians was hit in Ukraine's frontline city of Kherson, killing two people and wounding six.
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Bangkok Post
2 days ago
- Bangkok Post
Kyiv won't give up land, says Zelensky
KYIV - Ukraine won't give up land to Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned early on Saturday, hours after Washington and Moscow agreed to hold a summit in a bid to end the war. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will meet in the far-north US state of Alaska, near Russia, on Aug 15, to try to resolve the three-year conflict, despite multiple warnings from Ukraine and Europe that Kyiv must be part of the negotiations. Announcing the summit on Friday, Trump said that 'there'll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both' Ukraine and Russia, without providing further details. 'Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,' Zelensky said on social media hours later. 'Any decisions against us, any decisions without Ukraine, are also decisions against peace. They will achieve nothing,' he said, adding that the war 'cannot be ended without us, without Ukraine'. Three rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine this year have failed to bear fruit, and it remains unclear whether a summit would bring peace any closer. Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with millions forced to flee their homes. Putin has resisted multiple calls from the United States, Europe and Kyiv for a ceasefire. Zelensky said Kyiv was 'ready for real decisions that can bring peace' but said it should be a 'dignified peace', without giving details. The former KGB officer in power in Russia for over 25 years has also ruled out holding talks with Zelensky at this stage. Ukraine's leader has been pushing to make it a three-way summit and has frequently said meeting Putin is the only way to make progress towards peace. Far away from war The summit in Alaska, which Russia sold to the United States in 1867, would be the first between sitting US and Russian presidents since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021. This was just nine months before Moscow sent troops to Ukraine. Zelensky said of the location that it is 'very far away from this war, which is raging on our land, against our people'. The Kremlin said the choice was 'logical' because the state close to the Arctic is on the border between the two countries, and this is where their 'economic interests intersect'. Moscow has also invited Trump to pay a reciprocal visit to Russia later. Trump and Putin last sat together in 2019 at a G20 summit meeting in Japan during Trump's first term. They have spoken by telephone several times since January. On Friday, Putin held a round of calls with allies, including China and India, in a diplomatic flurry ahead of the summit with Trump, who has spent his first months in office trying to broker peace in Ukraine without making a breakthrough. The US president has earlier imposed an additional tariff on India for buying Russia's oil in a bid to nudge Moscow into talks. He also threatened to impose a similar tax on China, but so far has refrained from doing so. Away from the talks, across the more than 1,000-kilometre frontline, Russia and Ukraine continued pouring dozens of drones on each other in an overnight exchange of attacks on Saturday. As a result of that, a bus carrying civilians was hit in Ukraine's frontline city of Kherson, killing two people and wounding six.
Bangkok Post
2 days ago
- Bangkok Post
Alaska talks will test the desire for peace in Ukraine
Is there now a chance to end Russia's war in Ukraine? Are both sides in this bloody stalemate finally willing to give peace a chance, despite real reservations by both Moscow and Kyiv to keep the fighting going just a little longer? More importantly, are Ukraine's backers, notably the US and European countries such as the UK, Germany and Poland, able to exert enough pressure on Vladimir Putin to make a deal? A few months ago, it became clear to Moscow that the US and the Europeans were on the same page to push for additional support for Ukraine's sovereignty; the geopolitical realignment by the US-Nato places increased pressure on Russia. Now, President Donald Trump is set to meet Mr Putin during a landmark summit in Alaska this week as a prelude to presumably further negotiations, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This is long-shot diplomacy, which may get a long-awaited ceasefire in the war, or it could be just another opportunity for Mr Putin to smile and stall, to keep the clock running in Kyiv. While the meeting on American soil offers Moscow's leader both the legitimisation of diplomatic breakout without being slapped with an ICC arrest warrant, it offers Mr Putin the first in-person meeting with Mr Trump since 2018. This certainly trumps (no pun intended) Mr Putin's meetings with Arab leaders, a host of African potentates, and Brazil's Lula da Silva. This is gold standard stuff. Yet the Ukraine peace talks are set in the shadow of an overlooked backdrop of another diplomatic development very close to Mr Putin's concerns, as it borders Russia's southern frontier. Just last week, the Trump administration sponsored a quietly arranged peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There's a poignant lesson here for the Ukraine talks. Though the mountains and rugged Caucasian region are far removed from the flat steppes of Ukraine, the fact remains that both the longtime antagonists, Armenia and Azerbaijan, were once, as was Ukraine, also part of the former Soviet Union. For 35 years, Armenia, a small ancient Christian land, has been militarily bullied by a Muslim and oil-rich Azerbaijan. Conflicts over borders ensued, and fighting flared as recently as two years ago. Equally, Azerbaijan borders Iran and has long featured in Tehran's strategic concerns. This forgotten conflict in the Caucasus was addressed by American diplomacy, as Mr Trump brokered a deal that ended decades of conflict and offered both sides economic incentives. So, beyond the style of the summit, what substance can we expect? First, it's doubtful Mr Putin will make the proverbial peace deal. Instead, he will play the moment politically, spin subterfuge and offer hints of future concessions. The wish that Russia will withdraw troops from the nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory it occupies is a dream few hold, even in Kyiv. There can be rich rhetorical arguments, but there's a red line the Russian leader can't cross without looking weak to his own security apparatus. Mr Putin holds a neo-Soviet imperial view of Ukraine in which this former part of the Soviet Union has broken away and dares to confront the Kremlin. Crimea, with its key naval ports, especially, is viewed as a sacred part of the Russian motherland. Compromise isn't in the Russian vocabulary. Second, the US will pressure and cajole Mr Putin and warn that he will face wider sanctions. While tough measures will be threatened, Washington and the Europeans have not broken Russia's petro-driven economy. Both China and India remain major consumers of Russian petroleum. Third, a major Russian military offensive still has time for at least six weeks of good weather. While the Ukrainians are fighting valiantly with additional US and European military supplies, the Russians still have the raw numbers. Though Mr Putin has often stupidly used Russian conscripts and North Korean troops as cannon fodder, the bloodletting has emasculated Ukraine. Can Kyiv seriously fight Moscow to a draw? While European leaders have welcomed news of the Trump/Putin meeting, the Europeans are pushing for an uncompromising Ukrainian stance towards Moscow. Yet, a Gallup Poll taken in July shows "69% of Ukrainians say they want a negotiated settlement as soon as possible, while 24% support fighting until victory." The Trump administration aims to end this bloody conflict for the families on both sides. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce stated on FOX News, "The killing has to end…What Ukraine needs now is a ceasefire." Indeed so, and soon.
Bangkok Post
2 days ago
- Bangkok Post
Why is North Korea courting Russian tourists?
Hoping to replenish state coffers with much-needed foreign exchange reserves and offset the sharp post-Covid decline in Chinese tour groups, the Hermit Kingdom has set its sights on inquisitive holiday-makers from an ideologically aligned Russia. On July 27, Russian budget carrier Nordwind Airlines launched the first non-stop civilian flight from Moscow to Pyongyang in 77 years with more than 400 passengers allegedly on board. The inaugural monthly air route between both nations' capitals came on the heels of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un personally unveiling a newly developed, state-of-the-art beach resort in the Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Area at the end of June -- only to prohibit overseas arrivals a week thereafter. Curiously enough, this blanket entry ban applied to all outsiders except Russians -- 15 of whom spent a week in Pyongyang and Wonsan doing the bidding of a pro-Kremlin police state. As a reciprocal gesture of goodwill for the roughly 14,000 North Korean troops dispatched just under a year ago to fend off Ukraine's Kursk offensive on top of Pyongyang supplying up to 40% of Moscow's total ammunition for the "special military operation" since August 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov encouraged leisure seekers from Russia to visit the luxury seaside complex during his trip there in mid-July. For the deeply insecure and paranoid Kim dynasty, however, tourism promotion remains something of a double-edged sword. While bespoke tour packages peddled by state-owned travel agencies help the North Korean regime, there is a real danger of importing ideas and virtues that run counter to the militant self-sufficiency -- known as Juche -- which the reclusive East Asian country swears by. Westerners, in this regard, are looked upon as particularly inconvenient guests, not least because the noisy, rough-and-tumble democracies they hail from happen to be an anathema to the hereditary handover of power and the fabled "Paektu bloodline" that characterises North Korea. Arguably, the most notable and high-profile cultural clash to have arisen from these conflicting governance models was the incarceration of American college student Otto Warmbier by North Korean law enforcement authorities in January 2016. The then 21-year-old undergraduate was detained en route back to the United States and handed a draconian 15-year prison sentence for stealing a propaganda poster from a cordoned off section of his Pyongyang hotel. Despite the Trump administration securing his premature release and repatriation just 17 months later, an already paralysed and barely conscious Warmbier perished within days of returning home due to torture-induced brain damage. For the sake of averting such PR disasters, the North Korean government likely concluded that hosting Russian visitors is a much safer bet given their conformist nature and disinclination to deviate from officially accepted behaviour in a society where the stakes for independent thinking or open discourse could not be higher. It is worth recalling that prior to the coronavirus outbreak, an estimated 300,000 Chinese nationals frequented North Korea annually and accounted for around 90% of inbound tourists. That said, communist China's decision to fling its doors open to foreigners from 75 countries over the past couple of years has seen several predominantly Apec nations respond in kind. Beyond recurrent calls by certain EU member states to bar Vladimir Putin's subjects from the Schengen Area, some Russian tourists now routinely overstay their welcome, exude a false sense of entitlement in Kremlin-friendly Global South destinations, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Uzbekistan. The fact that they have begun flocking in record numbers to heavily embargoed jurisdictions such as Cuba and Iran speaks volumes about the unprecedented mobility constraints ordinary Russians currently face. Mindful of this, Chairman Kim is stepping up efforts to ensure North Korea ticks all the right boxes for the "brotherly" people of Russia. In February 2024, a group of 98 Russian journalists, students, social media influencers and travel bloggers were the first non-nationals to be granted access to the DPRK "under special circumstances" following a four-year Covid-inspired lockdown. Yet unlike that batch from Vladivostok, which, to their credit, made no bones about the suffocating restrictions they were subjected to or North Korea's untold internal deficiencies, the 15 Muscovites who headed there this time around were on a myth-busting mission to normalise and whitewash Mr Kim's gross mismanagement of his personal fiefdom. Aside from singing the praises of Pyongyang's ultra-modern architecture, Wonsan's pristine beaches and the mouth-watering local cuisine they were treated to, perhaps most telling was Anastasiya Samsonova's testimony to Sky News on witnessing "nothing terrible" in North Korea and feeling "absolutely free". That the 33-year-old HR manager and her fellow compatriots did not consider having a state-appointed minder leading them by the nose to pre-approved sites of interest and policing who they interacted with a violation of their freedom reflects how low a bar Russian tourists set for themselves when venturing abroad. Among the reasons why Russians are supplanting their Chinese counterparts as the primary target audience of North Korea's nascent tourism industry is thanks to increasingly strained ties between Moscow and Washington. Whereas Donald Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and subsequent "maximum pressure campaign," vis-à-vis Iran, garnered a great deal of attention during his first term in office, he adopted an equally hardline and hawkish approach towards North Korea with the exception of the 2018-19 period when diplomacy was given a chance by both parties to little avail. Needless to say, the Hermit Kingdom is still a US-designated "state sponsor of terrorism" and also features on the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF's) blacklist, meaning that any individual or entity caught bankrolling Bureau 39 -- the Kim family dictatorship's unofficial slush fund -- remains fair game for secondary sanctions. The rationale behind Nordwind Airlines operating charter flights to Pyongyang rather than Aeroflot was down to fears of the latter being denied US landing rights, as the Russian and American negotiating teams earlier pushed for a resumption of the pre-war direct Moscow-New York service.
