Top Zelensky Adviser Walks Back Interest in Talks with Russia

Top Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak called suggestions that his country should engage in peace negotiations with Russia “strange,” dismissing on Sunday any potential talks – a pivot away from the more conciliatory language that his boss, President Volodymyr Zelensky, began adopting this month.

In October, Zelensky published a decree proclaiming that talks with the Russian government were “impossible” so long as Vladimir Putin remains the president of that country. By mid-November, during an appearance at the United Nations climate change alarmism conference COP27, however, Zelensky was urging friendly nations to pressure Russia to engage in negotiations to end the war. He declared the expulsion of Russian forces from Kherson, a southern region Putin had “annexed,” “the beginning of the end of the war.”

Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, colonizing the country’s Crimean peninsula. The war between the two countries raged for eight years before Putin announced a “special operation” to remove Zelensky in February that escalated Russia’s official participation in the conflict into a full-scale assault on the country far beyond the eastern Donbas region where it had raged for the better part of a decade.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) in remarks published Sunday that calls for talks when his country appeared to be advancing on the battlefield were “a little strange.”

“When you have the initiative on the battlefield, it’s a little strange to receive proposals like: ‘You will not be able to do everything by military means anyway, you need to negotiate,'” Podolyak reportedly said, arguing that talks following the recovery of Kherson would mean that Ukraine “must capitulate to the country that is losing.”

Podolyak then accused Russian officials of not wanting talks with his government.

“Russia doesn’t want negotiations. Russia is conducting a communication campaign called ‘negotiations'” in an attempt to stall for time, Podolyak argued. “In the meantime, [Russia] would train its mobilized forces, find additional weapons…and fortify its positions.”

Zelensky himself appeared to take on a more aggressive stance than how he had been addressing the public recently on Monday, officially a holiday in Ukraine called “Day of Dignity and Freedom.” The government established the holiday in 2014 following the “revolution of dignity” that ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych that year. Russia still uses Yanukovych’s ouster to argue that Zelensky, who defeated Yanukovych successor Petro Poroshenko to become president in 2019, is not the legitimate head of state of Ukraine.

In his remarks on Monday, Zelensky applauded Ukrainians for participating in the war effort.

“Go to rallies under the occupation despite the gunshots and stun grenades. Preserve the Ukrainian flag and wait to finally meet the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Flood your village to prevent the orcs from entering Kyiv,” he said, recalling Ukrainians doing so throughout the year. “Shoot down a Russian drone with a can. Give seeds to the occupiers so that sunflowers sprout in the place where they perish.”

The change in tone followed Zelensky visiting Kherson, a formerly occupied region in southern Ukraine, last week and declaring that Ukraine would shift towards concluding the war with Russia.

“This is the beginning of the end of the war,” Zelensky said. “We are step by step coming to all the temporarily occupied territories.”

“We are moving on. We are ready for peace, but peace for our entire country,” the presidential office quoted Zelensky as saying. “This is the territory of our entire state. We respect international law and the sovereignty of every state, and now we are talking about the sovereignty of our state.”

Zelensky did not mention talks, but those remarks followed an address to COP27 in which he urged participating nations to pressure Russia to ask for negotiations.

“Anyone who is serious about the climate agenda should also be serious about the need to immediately stop Russian aggression, restore our territorial integrity, and force Russia into genuine peace negotiations,” Zelensky reportedly said. “Into such negotiations, which we have repeatedly proposed and to which we always received insane Russian responses with new terrorist attacks, shelling or blackmail.”

Zelensky has spent nearly his entire presidency expressing frustration with negotiations with Russia generally and Putin specifically. The two leaders last met in 2019 at talks organized alongside Germany and France that Zelensky at the time lamented as “very difficult” and unproductive.

“I’m happy … this work was very useful,” Putin told reporters after that event.

In September, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky said that his country had engaged in “88 rounds of talks” to settle the war between March 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, and February of this year, and that none had produced any substantive results. He noted this as an attempt to promote a path to peace that began with “punishment” of Russia and redress for its victims.

In response to Zelensky’s remarks in Kherson last week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said the Ukrainian conditions for future negotiations were “certainly unacceptable.”

Unlike Zelensky, Podolyak, who often speaks on behalf of the Ukrainian government in public, had not softened his tone following the decree calling talks “impossible.”

“Negotiating with Putin would mean giving up, and we would never give him this gift … The Russian army will leave Ukrainian territory, and then dialogue will come,” Podolyak insisted two weeks ago.

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