German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in an interview with the ZDF television network, asked for Russia’s participation in the second Peace Summit and is convinced that the time has come to discuss ways to end the war.
In a lengthy interview with public broadcaster ZDF on Sunday, Scholz said: “I think this is the time to discuss how we can get out of this war and achieve peace faster than it seems today.”
Previous peace conferences have excluded Russia and supported demands by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which Putin has dismissed as completely unacceptable.
Solz said there should be further peace talks that would bring the Russians to the negotiating table.
Zelensky’s peace plan calls for the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all areas of Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula.
Russia must also agree to reparations payments under the Ukrainian plan, as well as hand over Russian politicians and military personnel to an international criminal court.
Germany’s conservative opposition also strongly criticized Scholz for his comments on Monday, accusing him of trying to pressure Ukraine into accepting a “sham peace”.
Roderick Kiesewetter, foreign policy spokesman for the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), said Scholz is falling for Russian propaganda and continues to cling to old self-serving German delusions about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He said Scholz’s U-turn has made a “farce” that spells the death knell for his prominent declaration that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 would mark a turning point for German security policy.
Scholz is trying to promote himself as a “peace chancellor” at a deep cost to Germany and its allies, Kiesewetter told the Bild newspaper. The chancellor is “exacerbating the situation in Ukraine and thus weakening European and German security.”
But Kiesewetter argued that the overtures to Russia were part of a strategy by parts of Solz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) “to very subtly nudge Ukraine into a sham peace dictated by Russia, in which support is gradually waning and in return virtual negotiations are called for.”
Scholz’s comments come just under two weeks before his party colleague and premier of the eastern state of Brandenburg, Dietmar Voytke, faces a tough state election with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The SPD’s general secretary defended Solz against opposition criticism “Talks with the Kremlin are certainly not pleasant, but they are inevitable from the point of view of practical politics,” he told dpa.
The Kremlin rejects Germany’s proposal
The Russian government now sees no reason to hold peace talks with Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, flatly rejected German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s suggestion during an interview on Sunday that a negotiated peace could end the conflict.
“As for the peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, no tangible contours have yet emerged,” Peskov said in Moscow.
Russia has heard talks and statements about negotiations from various European leaders, “but we hear nothing from the country that is directing this process, that is directing the collective West,” Peskov said, referring to the United States.
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