The leaders of Britain, France and Germany met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa on Saturday to discuss a joint response to the unilateral US proposal for Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said. TASR informs according to the report of the AFP agency.
The meeting between Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took place ahead of a wider meeting on the same topic, which will also include other European leaders, the presidency said. Starmer previously said the aim was to “look at how we can strengthen this plan for the next phase of negotiations”.
According to a source from the EU, high-ranking politicians from other continents are expected to join the planned crisis negotiations on the US initiative to end the war in Ukraine on Saturday, writes the DPA agency.
They want to get rid of concessions
EU Council President António Costa invited representatives of Canada, Australia and Japan to the negotiations on the sidelines of the G20 summit, in addition to European heads of state and government. Negotiations should begin on Saturday afternoon. From Europe, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the heads of state and government of France, Italy, Great Britain, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain and Norway are expected to attend the meeting. They arrived at the summit in Johannesburg as permanent members or guests of the G20 group.
Consultations between all 27 EU heads of state and government will then take place on the sidelines of the EU-Africa summit, which begins on Monday in Angola, the French agency specifies. According to diplomats, the talks will focus, among other things, on how the 28-point plan presented by Washington could be used to eliminate concessions to Russia, which are unacceptable from the European point of view.
The publicized draft of the 28-point peace plan envisages Ukraine ceding all of Donbas to Russia and pledging that its army will have no more than 600,000 soldiers and will never join NATO, while Russia will be readmitted to the G8 group and sanctions imposed on Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine will be eased.
