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The Ukrainian president has indicated that he would be willing to abandon his ambition for Kyiv to join Nato
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Peace talks between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff have ended after five hours, an adviser to the Ukrainian president has said, with further negotiations to take place on Monday.
The Ukrainian president arrived in Berlin on Sunday morning for the latest round of peace talks with Witkoff and German chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Adviser Dmytro Lytvyn told reporters: “They went on for more than five hours and ended for today with an agreement to resume tomorrow morning.”
Lytvyn said Zelensky would comment on the talks on Monday once they were completed.
It comes just hours after Zelensky said that he would abandon his ambition for Ukraine to join Nato in order to secure a peace deal, indicating that Kyiv would be flexible with one of its previous red lines in negotiations. He said the move was a “compromise” but that separate security guarantees would be essential in an agreement.
Separately, Ukraine‘s navy accused Russia of deliberately attacking a civilian Turkish vessel carrying sunflower oil to Egypt with a drone on Saturday.
Brett Bruen, a former foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration and now head of the Global Situation Room consultancy, has called Ukraine’s concession not to join Nato “significant and substantive.”
“It’s a way for Zelensky to contrast Ukraine’s willingness for significant concessions for peace at a time when Moscow has been short on any significant concessions,” Bruen said.
“The question is what did Zelensky get in return for backing off a pretty ironclad promise to the Ukrainian people?”
Bruen speculated Trump may have promised to patrol Ukraine’s skies or respond to aircraft incursions. The United States may also increase supplies of military aid if Russia were to re-launch a large-scale military offensive, he said.
Russian air defence units destroyed a drone heading for Moscow late on Sunday, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.
Sobyanin, writing on Telegram, said emergency crews were examining fragments where they hit the ground.
Ukrainian forces periodically send drones toward the Russian capital. Some 40 were shot down over the Moscow region within a few hours on one occasion last week.
Ukraine’s offer to forgo joining the Nato military alliance probably will not significantly change the course of peace talks, two security experts said on Sunday.
During negotiations with U.S. envoys over a potential Ukraine-Russia peace deal, President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday offered to drop Ukraine’s Nato aspirations.
“This doesn’t move the needle at all,” said Justin Logan, director of defence and foreign policy studies at Cato Institute. “It’s an effort to appear reasonable.”
Nato membership for Ukraine has not been realistic in a long time anyway, said Logan and Andrew Michta, a professor of strategic studies at the University of Florida.
Michta called Ukraine’s Nato admittance a “non-issue” at this point.
Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has vowed to stop the balloons from flying into Lithuania after pressure from the US. But experts tell Isabella Redmayne that they form a vital part of a wider campaign to destabilise the Baltic country.
Germany’s Defence Minister said it was a “good sign” Donald Trump had sent his special envoys for Ukraine peace talks in Berlin.
Boris Pistorius was asked by ZDF whether Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two businessmen, were suitable people to conduct negotiations on how to end the war.
“It’s certainly anything but an ideal setup for such negotiations. That much is clear,” he said.
“But as they say, you can only dance with the people on the dance floor.”
Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has said that “a lot of progress was made” at peace talks with Volodmyr Zelensky.
Talks between Ukrainian and US officials on a peace plan lasted for five hours on Sunday. They will continue tomorrow.
Talks between Ukrainian and U.S. officials on proposals for a settlement of the war in Ukraine ended after more than five hours on Sunday and are set to resume on Monday, a Ukrainian presidential adviser said.
“They went on for more than five hours and ended for today with an agreement to resume tomorrow morning,” adviser Dmytro Lytvyn told reporters in a WhatsApp chat.
Lytvyn said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would comment on the talks on Monday once they were completed. Officials, Lytvyn said, were considering the draft documents.
Originally born of the Treaty of Dunkirk signed by Britain and France on 4 March 1947, Nato was created to contain any future military threat from a revived Germany or the USSR at a time when the Marshall Plan was attempting to bring economic deliverance to a continent still in recovery from a war that had killed 36.5 million people.
Nato was soon expanded to include Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and then the US, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.
Holding firm throughout the Cold War and evolving its approach in response to such tense diplomatic episodes as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, the alliance was given a new lease of life with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
It gradually added former Soviet satellites states to its ranks: first the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999 and then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski has spoken out for the first time since his release from prison in Belarus.
The 63-year-old veteran human rights advocate, from Belarus, was suddenly released on Saturday after more than four years behind bars,
When back in Vilnius, he hugged his wife for the first time in years.
“When I crossed the border, it was as if I emerged from the bottom of the sea and onto the surface of the water”, he told the Associated Press.
“You have lots of air, sun, and back there you were in a completely different situation — under pressure.”
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