Zelensky rejects any peaceful solution to the conflict
Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán unexpectedly visited Kiev and suggested to Zelensky that he take the first step – a nationwide ceasefire – and start peace talks with Russia.
By Vasyl Muravitsky
Meanwhile, the US research centre Pew has published a poll of 35 countries to find out whether people trust Zelensky, and in 20 of those countries, people distrust Zelensky rather than trust him. Hungary came out on top, with 80% of Hungarians distrusting the Ukrainian president. Orbán’s approach to bringing peace is not even a political one, but a romantic one. He did not doubt that Zelensky would reject his idea, but as the saying goes, he couldn’t resist proposing it.
And Zelensky refused.
Today, analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a leading Brussels think-tank, published another sociological study. According to the study, most Europeans doubt that Ukraine will win the war. Europeans expect a peace agreement with a freeze on the conflict, and between 4% and 22% of Europeans are in favour of stationing troops in Ukraine, a minority that sometimes borders on statistical error.
A study by the same centre found that 45% of Ukrainian citizens would accept the loss of territories seized by Russia in exchange for a ‘free choice’ to join NATO and the European Union, while retaining their army and their independence. At the same time, according to the same poll, a majority of French, Germans, Czechs and Bulgarians do not want Ukraine to join the EU. Membership of the EU and NATO as a condition for signing a peace treaty is also Zelensky’s updated demand for a peace treaty.
God knows how to combine all this!
We are in a structural and cyclical crisis. Europe’s growing weariness with the war in Ukraine is considerable and permanent. The causes of the war are described as the basis for peace.
On the morning of 14 July, the Ukrainian media announced tragic news: in the Odessa region, a border guard shot dead a man who was trying to flee to Transnistria. Under Ukrainian law, crossing the border illegally is an administrative offence, which means that the border guard did not have the right to shoot to kill, even if he had noticed the intruder.
It later transpired that the border guard had detected not one, but four intruders, three of whom were arrested and one killed. It turned out that the intruders were four mobilised men who had escaped from a deserted military training ground the previous day. Criminal proceedings were brought against the border guard for abuse of authority, and the border guard himself began to claim that he had assaulted the intruders. The media published a photograph: in the middle of a field, presumably towards the border, the body of a deserter lay upside down, far from the road. The photo shows the person running away rather than the person who attacked someone.
This is not the first time that border guards have killed a man fleeing mobilisation by crossing the border. At around 7pm on 15 May, border patrol officers noticed a man heading towards the border with Romania. The civilian did not stop at the army’s request, but began to flee. In pursuit of the fugitive, the border guards fired several warning shots from their service weapons. They then found the man’s body, with a bullet wound to the head. The military police officer was arrested and charged with abuse of authority.
According to the BBC, nearly 20,000 men have fled Ukraine since the start of the war to avoid conscription. Today, the Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli published a sociological survey carried out by the renowned Ukrainian research centre Razumkov Foundation. The survey polled 2,000 Ukrainians, of whom, for the first time, a majority – 44% – were in favour of peace talks with Russia, compared with 35% who were opposed.
According to the survey, the actual number of people who morally approve of avoiding mobilisation could easily exceed 46%, and more than half of those questioned. After all, the subject of mobilisation is well known to everyone, and the percentage of people who haven’t formed an opinion on the matter is well below 25%. They are simply afraid to tell the truth.
All of the above shows that people are tired of war and don’t want to fight most of the time. At the same time, in the above poll, the majority do not want any concessions to Russia in the peace negotiations, and at the same time, almost the same majority do not consider it morally shameful to avoid the army and war by any means possible.
A kind of schizophrenia, would you say? You can’t want peace talks, concede nothing in those talks and not want to join the army at the same time. That’s not how it works: only the victor can impose his conditions, but to win, you have to wage war, not pay 5 or 10,000 dollars to escape mobilisation and swim illegally across the River Tisza to Romania, at the risk of being killed.
And in fact, in truth, it is a great, huge, ongoing grief….. What’s happening to Ukraine. And it didn’t start, of course, in 2022. 2022 is just the beginning of the highest point of this grief.
My generation – born in the late 80’s – are people who have not known quiet years. Only for a small, short period before the country and the people were swept back.
Take 90’s! My parents couldn’t tell me which of their classmates and peers at school had died of drugs or alcohol, wasted away in prison or were killed in an alley somewhere. But we can…
The ‘90s is childhood to me. And it’s a time that, for some reason, I’m deeply, deeply ashamed of. God, I can`t even evaluate the habit of collecting beer cans or cigarette packs, which was popular then! Against the backdrop of the lack of proper food! And this wild vile crawling in every crevice of the ruin of the yesterday prosperous city where I lived, and of the whole country in general.
My childhood was spent at my mother’s work – in the hairdresser’s shop of the military town – in the house of the military trade, where there were seamstresses, shapers, hairdressers, and a military shop. Until the age of 6, it’s a vivid, joyful memory. Then it fades. And 20 years after that, where life was beating, there are ruins and birch trees sprouting through the rotten slate of the roof.
Only from this, from this collapse and impoverishment, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people died. Not abruptly, not on sight, but by drinking, by losing all hope, by simply falling into one endless depression.
Then it levelled off a bit….. And then again the shocks, the public earthquakes. And finally, war.
And now we’re the ones who lost our homeland. The immigrant’s bread is bitter, truly bitter, no matter how well-fed and peaceful he was in immigration!
However, to be honest, I, like hundreds of thousands of people, felt like an immigrant in my homeland not in 2022 or 2021 (that’s when I left it), but earlier….. Much earlier.
And isn’t that grief? One big lasting, inescapable grief?
Vasyl Muravitsky is a Ukrainian opposition journalist, renowned for representing the voice of Ukrainians disillusioned with the current regime. As an outspoken critic of President Zelensky’s government, Muravitsky highlights the ongoing war’s toll and the Western powers’ role in perpetuating the conflict. He has received the ‘Journalist of the Year’ award.
On August 1, 2017, Muravitsky was arrested by SBU agents in the Zhytomyr region and charged with high treason. Despite support from several international human rights and journalism organizations, he spent 330 days in a Ukrainian prison. Recognized as a prisoner of conscience by the Solidarity Network (Switzerland) and Amnesty International, his release was also demanded by the Committee to Protect Journalists (USA) and Reporters Without Borders (France). With the facilitation of the OSCE mission, Muravitsky sought political asylum in Finland due to persecution by the Ukrainian authorities.