Volodymyr Zelensky, in the next phase of talks to end the war in Ukraine, intends to draw a red line at the most contentious issue on the table: the Russian demand for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. As long as he remains the nation’s president, Zelensky will not agree to give up land in exchange for peace, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, told me today in an exclusive interview.
“Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” said Yermak, who has served as Zelensky’s chief of staff, lead negotiator, and closest aide throughout the full-scale war with Russia.
“As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory,” he told me by telephone from Kyiv. “The constitution prohibits this. Nobody can do that unless they want to go against the Ukrainian constitution and the Ukrainian people.”
It’s not our decision to make how many people Ukraine is willing to sacrifice for their land. That’s THEIR decision.
The better question here is how many people is Russia willing to sacrifice for a war of conquest that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
It’s our decision whether we give them billions of dollars of weapons.
Absolutely it is. We choose whether we live in a world where we defend freedom or where we appease bullies.
I guess for some people it’s an easier choice than for others.
Is that why Ukraine is over $100 billion in debt to its Western “allies”?
Putting people into debt slavery is a weird way to defend freedom…
Debt is a normal part of war, and Ukraine’s war debt is about a quarter of their peacetime GDP. Most of that has already been covered by the EU aid package last year.
Characterizing that as debt slavery is a pretty huge stretch.
At this scale those debts are a chain around their necks that can be used to control them.
As for the aid package, it merely covers half of the debt. On top of that? It’s conditional! Ukraine has to meet certain requirements to receive that aid: energy, border management, agricultural demining, and the development of a list of “strategic and essential” raw materials. Aside from demining that doesn’t sound like defending freedom, that sounds like they are trapping a client state into dependency so they can be exploited for primary production.
This has never been about freedom, I don’t know how anyone could ever believe it was.
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It clearly is, or you wouldn’t be telling them the terms for peace.
They’re not the ones negotiating loss of territory. You gotta quit this “Well I’m rubber and your glue” line of reasoning.