SIC Correspondent
It’s an important week for Ukraine. Zelensky is meeting in Paris with Macron and, in Brussels, the European Union’s defense ministers are meeting. The topic on the table is military support for Ukraine. A meeting that takes place on the eve of Steve Witkoff traveling to Moscow for a meeting with Vladimir Putin.
It is the 10th visit of the President of Ukraine to France and, possibly, one of the most important. In Brussels, European Defense Ministers are meeting to analyze military support for Ukraine and, in Paris, President Zelensky is meeting with his French counterpart to discuss the Geneva meetings and Trump’s peace plan.
Zelensky is under strong pressure, both military and political, at a time when Donald Trump expresses optimism about the resolution of the conflict started almost four years ago by Russia.
The meeting in Paris took place on the eve of a new meeting between Trump’s emissary and Vladimir Putin.
“The meeting with Witkoff is scheduled for tomorrow [terça-feira]”, indicated the spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dmitri Peskov, during his daily press conference, in which AFP participated, specifying that the meeting would take place “in the second part of the day”.
This trip to Russia will take place following negotiations between the North American and Ukrainian delegations in Florida, on Sunday, considered “productive” by American Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Ministers analyze plan that excludes EU and support for winter
Also meeting, but in Brussels, are the European Union’s defense ministers to discuss military support for Ukraine, given the arrival of winter, and the peace plan.
The Minister of National Defense, Nuno Melo, will not be at the meeting, the last this year, and the Government will be represented by the Deputy Secretary of State and National Defense Policy, Nuno Pinheiro Torres.
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The meeting is headed by the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, and Ukrainian Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal and the Under-Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Radmila Shekerinska, will also participate.
With the arrival of winter, which will make any movement on Ukrainian territory impossible due to the accumulation of snow, Ukraine, the EU and NATO hope that the conflict will take the same form as in recent years: Russian bombings of energy infrastructures to try to cut off heating and put pressure on the population of a country for almost four years trying to repel the Russian invasion.
At the same time, EU leaders will discuss the investments that need to be made in the area of defense and cooperation between Member States for the next five years. But the most important topic of the meeting continues to be the prospect of a ceasefire in Ukraine and a possible peace agreement, after the presentation of a proposal to that effect by the President of the United States of America (USA), Donald Trump.
However, the proposal had several ‘red lines’ for this side of the Atlantic, namely the ceding to Russia of all the territory it has annexed since February 2022 and also the Crimean peninsula (occupied in 2014), the halving of the military number of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (to around 400,000), and it was designed excluding the European Union from the entire process.
