Switzerland and Global South countries promote Peace Summit decision unfavourable for Ukraine

Under pressure from Switzerland and the countries of the Global South, amendments unfavourable for Ukraine have been added to the draft decision of the Peace Summit which threaten the without-alternative status of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s peace formula, and open the way for other peace initiatives.

Source: article by European Pravda (EP) Without peace and with compromises. What threats does the Peace Summit in Switzerland pose to Ukraine and is it possible to avoid them?

Details: The decision by the summit, if approved in the wording that some media outlets have seen, will definitely not meet Ukraine’s ambitions.

Switzerland, which is hosting the summit, has taken into consideration the proposals put forward by key players in the draft decision (and added some amendments unfavourable for Kyiv itself) and sent out the results to the capitals of the participating states for final approval before the summit.

EP says this document "completely destroys the idea of the Peace Summit". But Ukraine gave up its plans under pressure from Bern and other countries.

"The key change is that ‘Zelenskyy’s peace formula’ has stopped being a without-alternative or at least a key document for settling the war," the article says.

Now, the participants of the summit are basing their decisions on "the Ukrainian peace formula and other peace propositions" without any of them playing a special role. Thus, initiatives similar to the Chinese one, some points of which look like a formula for Ukraine’s capitulation, have the same level of legitimacy as the Ukrainian "peace plan".

"All provisions that could serve as the bridge to ‘Zelenskyy’s peace plan’, such as the list of its points, have been removed from the draft documents," the article says.

Moreover, the summit focuses on only three narrow issues (nuclear security, food security and the liberation of prisoners of war), which are included in the Ukrainian Peace Formula but whose implementation is not relevant to achieving peace.

The Swiss side explained that such a narrow selection is supposed to "facilitate consensus building". Yet all this poses additional threats to Ukraine, specifically in terms of the further involvement of Russia in the negotiation process and the conditions necessary for it.

"Therefore, in order for Russia to turn from an aggressor into a participant in peaceful negotiations, the ‘confidence-building measures’ must not only concern the nuclear sector, maritime security and prisoners of war swaps," the article states.

With that, Ukraine has made considerable concessions concerning its requirements in the "nuclear bloc": all mentions of the liberation or demilitarisation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant have been removed from the draft document.

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