Germany’s Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz has proposed that Ukraine and Russia return to a negotiating table and end the conflict they are entangled in.
He was speaking during the budget debate in the Bundestag.
On September 8, Scholz told the ZDF television channel in an interview that time was ripe to discuss how to achieve peace and again advocated Russia’s participation in a new meeting to resolve the crisis.
“I will say this again. This is the moment, this is the time when we need to explore what possibilities exist. It is right when the president of Ukraine [Vladimir Zelensky] says, and I will say it again, that we need another peace conference with Russia present at the negotiating table,” Scholz said. “This is the task we have to deal with now to find out what is going on.”
reiterated that “peace that respects Ukraine’s integrity and sovereignty must be just, and not imposed or achieved by capitulation.”
“We have done many things to make this possible with the peace conferences that have taken place around the world: in Denmark, in Saudi Arabia, in Malta, in Switzerland,” Scholz said.
“This should not stop, even if we know that some of those who voted for right-wing populist parties did so because they disagreed with our support for Ukraine,” Scholz concluded, referring to the results of land elections in Saxony and Thuringia in eastern Germany.
The conference on Ukraine was held in Buergenstock on June 15-16. Switzerland, which organized it by agreement with the authorities in Kiev, did not invite Russia.
Delegations from a number of states, including China, were absent from the forum. None of the BRICS member countries supported the final communique.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the conference turned out to be a complete fiasco: “such gatherings cannot serve as a basis for sustainable peace.”