(CN) — With peace talks set to resume, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested his country could stay out of NATO and he seemed willing to concede some Ukrainian territory to Russia.
Two days of ceasefire negotiations are to take place Tuesday in Istanbul but the prospects of a deal remain very uncertain with neither side wanting to be seen as surrendering and making big concessions while fighting in Ukraine seems to have reached a bloody stalemate.
Russia agreed for the talks to take place in Istanbul, a minor but perhaps significant shift because previous negotiations took place in Belarus, a Russian ally. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seeking to establish himself as a key mediator in ending the war. Turkey is a NATO member but it has close ties with both Russia and Ukraine.
In an interview on Sunday with Russian outlets critical of the Kremlin, Zelenskyy said he would consider holding a referendum on NATO membership.
“Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are prepared to go through with it,” Zelenskyy said in the interview, as reported by Politico.
He added that he was prepared for compromise on the disputed Donbas region and said trying to recapture all the territory currently held by Russian troops could lead to World War III. But he added that any deal would have to be based on a withdrawal of Russian troops from everywhere outside of Donbas.
Russia’s media watchdog forbid the interview from being made available in Russia, saying it needed to be vetted. Four of the five news organizations Zelenskyy spoke to have been restricted in Russia, including the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, Novaya Gazeta said it was suspending publication until the end of the Ukraine war because it had received another warning from Roskomnadzor, the media watchdog agency. The newspaper won the Nobel Prize Peace Prize last October for its courageous journalism. Since the invasion, it has run afoul of censorship guidelines, including a ban on calling the invasion of Ukraine a “war.” Journalists in Russia must call it instead a “special military operation,” the term used by Putin when he launched the invasion on Feb. 24, upending world politics and the global economy and bringing war back to Europe.
Despite his comments in Sunday's interview, Zelenskyy’s position on peace talks is unclear. In a video message late Sunday, he vowed that Ukraine will not cede any territory to Russia and that Ukraine is winning the war.
He also pointed to Roskomnadzor's decision to block the publication of his interview with Russian journalists as more evidence of why Ukrainians are resisting Russian occupation.
“They destroyed freedom of speech in their state, they are trying to destroy the neighboring state,” he said. “They portray themselves as global players. And they themselves are afraid of a relatively short conversation with several journalists.”
Zelenskyy's government too has imposed restrictions on the press and opposition parties. Under his watch and before the invasion, pro-Russian news outlets were banned and he recently outlawed a number of opposition political parties because of their alleged pro-Russian rhetoric, even though they'd condemned Putin's invasion. He signed a law on Sunday making it a crime for anyone, including foreign journalists, to detail information about Ukrainian troop and equipment movements without government approval.
On Monday, Alexander Rodnyansky, a Zelenskyy presidential adviser, confirmed to the BBC that Ukraine will not give up territory, or what Kyiv terms its “territorial integrity.”
“Clearly, they cannot sustain this war for years and their morale is so low they can’t even keep up their supplies and logistics,” Rodnyansky said about Russia. “If you ask the people who live in these areas, they wouldn’t want to live in Russia. How can we leave them? Let alone the whole idea of slicing up our country.”
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