KYIV (Reuters) -President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that Ukraine would be ready to hold talks with Russia in any format once a ceasefire deal is in place and the fighting has stopped.
The Ukrainian leader also told reporters at a briefing that a Ukrainian delegation meeting officials from Western countries in London on Wednesday would have a mandate to discuss a full or partial ceasefire.
“We are ready to record that after a ceasefire, we are ready to sit down in any format so that there are no dead ends,” Zelenskiy said in the presidential office in Kyiv.
“It will not be possible to agree on everything quickly,” he warned, noting numerous highly complex issues such as territory, security guarantees and Ukraine’s membership in the NATO military alliance.
He said that Ukraine would not recognise Moscow’s de jure control of the peninsula of Crimea as part of any deal as such a move would go against the Ukrainian constitution. Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and later annexed it.
Ukraine, he said, would be ready to partner with the United States to restore the work of the vast, Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. There had been no such formal proposal from Washington about that, however, he added.
The talks in London, which are set to bring together officials from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Ukraine, come amid a flurry of U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to find a way to end Russia’s war with Ukraine.
In an apparent change of plan, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will not be attending the talks in London, a State Department spokesperson said on Tuesday, adding that Washington’s Ukraine envoy General Keith Kellogg would attend.
Zelenskiy said he would be happy to meet U.S. President Donald Trump later this week when they attend the funeral of Pope Francis along with other world leaders.
Ukraine, Zelenskiy said, would also step up its diplomatic outreach this week and that he would meet South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, as well as the leaders of Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash and Yuliia Dysa; writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by William Maclean and Mark Heinrich)
