The guest of the Chairman of the Board of Ukraine Crisis Media Center, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Valeriy Chaly in the project Geopolitical Dialogues was a person with no less diplomatic background – Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine (2019-2020), Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine (2020) Vadym Prystaiko. The main topics of the meeting were assessment of the global current situation and the prospects for deploying peacekeeping forces to Ukraine.
At the beginning of the conversation, Valeriy Chaly was interested in the guest’s opinion on what point of crisis humanity is at.
“The United States is going through a very challenging period. I worked there in 2009-2012, and even then I noticed a striking difference between the American elite, which began to increasingly acquire ideas of liberalism, all kinds of equality, and a stagnant rural religious life of the hinterland,” Vadym Prystaiko noted.
As for Europe, he believes it is losing leadership. While remaining a spiritual ideological leader, the continent no longer plays a significant role in the economy or in creating new meanings.
“I don’t want to say that the European page has closed, but Europe is really no longer a producer of even ideological content. Apart from Eurovision, we can hardly name any other cultural products that are consumed all over the world,” the diplomat added.
What should Ukraine do in this situation? Valeriy Chaly touched upon the issue of preserving national identity as a cornerstone, around which a struggle is raging. Vadym Prystaiko, for his part, advised not only to stick to the accepted red lines in negotiations, but also to strengthen communication at the internal and external levels.
“Now we are still trying to explain to our partners what we believe does not even need to be explained. It’s clear who attacked whom, and our attempts to explain it to them, the skirmishes that are taking place, are sad for me as a diplomat to watch. I realize that this is not the way to go. On the other hand, diplomacy is often just a straightforward, honest, open, clear conversation that allows a diplomat to set the framework and then act. And one of the frameworks is that we will not agree to the possibility of exchanging territories, and all the Witkoffs should stay outside this discussion,” the guest emphasized.
The diplomats paid much attention to discussing the format of peacekeepers. According to the Chairman of the UCMC Board, this issue is already overdue.
“The format discussed in Great Britain is Peace enforcement – one or two fully equipped brigades. The format proposed by the President of France can be called peacekeepers. Can this give us a realistic leverage for negotiations on sending international peacekeeping forces to Ukraine this year?” he asked his colleague.
Vadym Prystaiko believes that it should have been done much earlier.
“I can’t understand at all why, on the first day of Macron’s statement a year ago, we did not submit a draft law on the admission of French armed forces to the territory of Ukraine for consideration to the Verkhovna Rada. We should be a little smarter, see the situation more broadly and use all the tools that are allowed and are in our hands,” he said.
Valeriy Chaly added that currently, bilateral documents allow this to be done, and this is Ukraine’s sovereign right.
The diplomat expressed confidence that the various narratives that are now being heard about the fact there is nothing more Ukraine can do, and therefore it will be forced to recognize the situation contradict the reality. In fact, there are a lot of scenarios and changes, and they are all on the table.
To sum up the discussion, he focused on several key points that should be taken into account in today’s conditions.
“The first is the red lines, and they are clear to everyone both in domestic and foreign policy. The second point is the overdue need for direct participation of the military, and whether to call them peacekeepers is a separate question. And the third point – we see that without strengthening the position of pressure on Russia, no plans and ideas can remain empty,” Valeriy Chaly concluded.