Moscow Says It Won’t Participate in the Second Peace Summit

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin announced that Moscow will not participate in the second Peace Summit, to which Kyiv has said it intends to invite Russia.

He claims that Ukraine's and the West's plans for a second peace summit are an attempt to “rehabilitate” the alleged “failure” of the Switzerland summit. In addition, Galuzin called President Volodymyr Zelensky's Peace Formula “dead-end and ultimatum.”

“We have another manifestation of fraud. We do not accept such ultimatums and are not going to participate in such summits,” Sergey Lavrov's deputy said.

According to Bloomberg, Ukraine wants to hold a second peace summit with Russian participation before the US presidential election in November.

A Ukrainian official confirmed the plan to hold the second summit before the US election.  Officials from Western allies have said that any meeting should be carefully organized, with a clearly defined goal and managed expectations.

However, some unnamed US officials are not convinced that a summit with Russia and Ukraine will take place.

Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, said in June that the “bad experience” of previous negotiation formats involving Moscow, prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, meant that the end to the war needed to be built on a broad platform of support from the outset -- and be rooted in international law.

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Speaking to reporters after the meeting, the Finnish head of government said “the security situation has changed.”

“For the second summit, we will be working with all colleagues, with all countries who will be interested to be involved,” Yermak told European media organizations, via video link from Berlin.

“We are planning to prepare together a joint plan which will be supported by all these responsible countries. And we're looking for the possibility, in the second summit, to invite a representative of Russia, and together present this joint plan.”

He said perspective backed by “100 or more countries” drawn from every continent, rather than just Ukraine's position, “will be a real plan which will be very difficult to dispute... a real road map how to stop this war and how to settle the crisis.”

Asked for his views on the Bloomberg article and whether Russia was open to the idea of a peace summit, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS that speculating on any potential peace summit that currently has no definitive agenda was pointless.

Without overtly contradicting Galuzin, Peskov said, “President Putin and the Russian Federation are always open to dialogue, we have never rejected dialogue, but we must have an idea of its substance.”