LONDON: Ukraine will offer to swap territory with Russia in any potential peace negotiations, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview published Tuesday, adding that Europe alone would not be able to shoulder Kyiv\u2019s war effort.
\nZelensky will meet US Vice President JD Vance on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, the Ukrainian leader\u2019s spokesman told AFP, as Washington pushes for an end to the nearly three-year war with Russia.
\nVance has been a frequent critic of US support that has been vital to Ukraine\u2019s war effort.
\n\u201cThere are voices which say that Europe could offer security guarantees without the Americans, and I always say no,\u201d Zelensky told the Guardian newspaper in an interview published on the UK newspaper\u2019s website on Tuesday.
\n\u201cSecurity guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,\u201d he said.
\nTrump is keen for both sides to reach a deal, the terms of which are a source of concern in Ukraine.
\nZelensky told the Guardian he would offer Russian President Vladimir Putin territory that Ukraine seized in Russia\u2019s Kursk region six months ago.
\n\u201cWe will swap one territory for another,\u201d he said, adding that he did not know which territories he would ask for in return.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know, we will see. But all our territories are important, there is no priority,\u201d he said.
\nRussia says it has annexed five regions of Ukraine \u2014 Crimea in 2014 and then Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia in 2022 \u2014 though it does not have full control over them.
\nTrump confirmed Monday that he would soon dispatch his special envoy Keith Kellogg, who is tasked with drawing up a proposal to halt the fighting, to Ukraine.
\nThe US president is pressing for a swift end to the conflict, while Zelensky is calling for tough security guarantees from Washington as part of any deal.
\nKyiv fears that any settlement that does not include hard military commitments, such as NATO membership or the deployment of peacekeeping troops, will allow the Kremlin time to regroup and rearm for a fresh attack.
\nZelensky has said he would offer US companies lucrative reconstruction contracts in a bid to win over Trump.
\n\u201cThose who are helping us to save Ukraine will renovate it, with their businesses together with Ukrainian businesses. All these things we are ready to speak about in detail,\u201d he told the Guardian.
\nUkraine has some of the biggest mineral reserves in Europe and it is \u201cnot in the interests of the United States\u201d for those to fall into Russian hands, he said.
\n\u201cValuable natural resources where we can offer our partners possibilities that didn\u2019t exist before to invest in them. For us it will create jobs, for American companies it will create profits,\u201d he added.
\nThe Munich meeting comes with Russia advancing across Ukraine\u2019s eastern Donetsk region, where over the past year it has captured several settlements, most completely flattened by months of Russian bombardments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Ukraine will offer to swap territory with Russia in any potential peace negotiations, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview published Tuesday, adding that Europe alone would not be able to shoulder Kyiv\u2019s war effort. Zelensky will meet US Vice President JD Vance on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, the Ukrainian leader\u2019s spokesman …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":76950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76951,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76931\/revisions\/76951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}