By Janet Ekstract NEW YORK – As the G7 Summit wrapped up in Italy, world leaders headed to the first ever peace summit on Ukraine, to get underway on Saturday in Switzerland. The two-day event will include U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris along with leaders from Britain, Canada, Italy and Germany. Leaders will meet at the Burgenstock resort outside Lucerne, where Ukraine’s President Zelensky and over 100 heads of state and government will meet with Russia and China bowing out. Leaders include those from the EU, South America, the Middle East and Asian nations. The focus of the summit is to lay out a future roadmap for peace for Ukraine that will center on a discussion of Zelensky’s 10-point plan to end the war with three other points: the nuclear threat, food security and humanitarian needs in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin expressed his distaste for the summit when he labeled it a “trick to distract everyone.” In addition, Putin underscored his prerequisites for peace: Ukraine can’t apply to NATO and must pull its troops out of the east and south “immediately.” Zelensky condemned the demands, calling them a territorial “ultimatum,” likening it to Hitler, the U.S. also rejected Putin’s demands.
On Sunday, it’s expected that a joint communique will be issued that focuses on the significance of the U.N. principles in maintaining and respecting “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The peace summit on Ukraine is part of Zelensky’s plan to build international support for the peace plan that would include a full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and a return to its 1991 post-Soviet borders. Peace summit organizers chose not to focus on China’s decision to bow out of the summit while Zelensky has accused China of assisting Russia to undermine the summit. China’s foreign ministry has denied the accusation. Zelensky had been pushing for a Chinese delegation to attend the summit to give the conference further legitimacy and to create a rift between Moscow and China. China’s reason for not attending as it explained is that the conference didn’t meet its requirements, including that Russian participation be present. A former U.S. state department official Max Bergann said “It’s rather remarkable that there’s 100 countries showing up to a peace summit at which the main instigator of that conflict is not participating.” Bergmann who is now the head of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the peace summit is a “diplomatic masterstroke.” This summit comes after several previous meets including one that took place in Saudi Arabia with 40 participating countries including China who has its own six-point peace plan. Diplomats said that China has been doing its own aggressive outreach with dignitaries but summit organizers said there has been “no concretization” of Chinese diplomatic moves with global south countries including Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Ecuador.
