GENEVA, Apr 10 About 120 heads of state and governments will be invited to a peace conference on Ukraine in Switzerland in June, according to a statement published on the website of the country's Foreign Ministry.
«In total, about 120 countries will be invited at the level of heads of state and government,» the document says.
Switzerland will host a peace conference on Ukraine near the city of Lucerne in June. Russia will not be present. The day before, the press secretary of the Russian Embassy in Bern, Vladimir Khokhlov, said that Switzerland had not sent an invitation to the Russian Federation to participate in the summit on Ukraine, and Moscow would not participate in any case. He added that the idea of a peace conference, strongly promoted by the organizers, is unacceptable for the Russian Federation, since “we are talking about another option for pushing through an unviable “peace formula” that does not take into account Russian interests.
The Swiss president previously reported that Zelensky asked to organize a peace summit on Ukraine. As the head of Zelensky’s office, Andriy Ermak, previously stated, Kyiv wants to hold summits to approve the Ukrainian “peace formula.” Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis noted that there is no alternative to Russia’s participation in the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine and holding a peace conference without the Russian Federation is impossible.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at a meeting with Cassis in January, emphasized that Moscow, when building bilateral relations, takes into account Bern’s departure from the principles of neutrality and his support for Kyiv. The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, stated in February that the potential of Switzerland as an “honest broker” in resolving conflicts has exhausted itself for the Russian Federation.
Moscow has repeatedly indicated that it is ready for negotiations, but Kyiv has introduced a ban on them at the legislative level. The West is calling on Russia for negotiations, which Moscow is willing to do, but at the same time the West is ignoring Kyiv’s constant refusals to engage in dialogue. Previously, the Kremlin stated that there are now no prerequisites for the situation in Ukraine to transition to a peaceful direction; the absolute priority for Russia is to achieve the goals of the special operation; at the moment this is only possible through military means. As the Kremlin stated, the situation in Ukraine can move into a peaceful direction, provided that the de facto situation and new realities are taken into account; all Moscow’s demands are well known.
Earlier, Zelensky, in an interview with the American television channel CBS, admitted that not all countries want to go to the summit on Ukraine in Switzerland because of relations with Russia.