Former Foreign Affairs Minister António Martins da Cruz argues that the European Union (EU) is not in a position to negotiate peace in Ukraine because this “would not be viewed fairly by the Russian side.” This Tuesday, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, also admitted that short-term peace negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine are impossible in an interview published by the Spanish newspaper El País.
For Martins da Cruz, the “great involvement in support of Ukraine” by the EU would not be well received by Russian officials, leaving other “possible mediators”, which he identified in statements to the TSF: “Maybe China, maybe Brazil and other countries in a group of countries called global south.”
In addition to these, “the only NATO country, although not the European Union, that could have some possibility of mediation, as it has already partially done, is Turkey”, but that depends on the elections next Sunday, “for knowing what the system is is the politician who stays in Turkey”.
Thus, Martins da Cruz aligns three possible paths for peace: freezing the situation, going back to the past or Russian withdrawal.
In the first mode, that of freezing, the concept is the same that was already applied to the Korean War “in the 1950s, when North Korea and South Korea were born” and to the Turkish invasion of North Cyprus, in which “the situation was frozen in Cyprus”.
The second hypothesis is the so-called previous status quo, that is, the return to the situation that existed before the conflict”, and for this it is necessary “to know if it is the situation of 2014, before the occupation of Crimea, or the situation of 2022, before the invasion of Donbass and other parts of Ukraine.”
The third track involves the “full or partial withdrawal of Russian forces.”
“It is within these three where a negotiating solution will have to be found,” points out the former head of Portuguese diplomacy, but there “Europe has something to say, especially since it has the enlargement of Ukraine on the table.”
Source: TSF
