Up to 30 Western and key developing countries are expected to be represented at the summit. Credit: Freepik.
Prague, July 31 (CTK) – The Czech Republic has been invited to a summit in Saudi Arabia in early August, where delegates from Western and developing countries will discuss Ukraine, Czech Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Drake told CTK yesterday. He added that it was still being decided who will represent the Czech Republic at the event.
Citing diplomats, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported about the planned summit on Saturday. The USA and Europe are trying to win broad international support for peace, the terms of which will be set by Ukraine, the WSJ wrote.
Up to 30 Western and key developing countries are expected to be represented at the summit. Russia has not been invited, according to the WSJ.
“I can confirm that the Czech Republic has received an invitation to the summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the level of representation is being discussed,” Drake wrote to CTK.
Representatives from India and Brazil will also attend the meeting, which will take place on 5-6 August, according to the WSJ. It will be held at a time of growing rivalry between the West and Russia over support from key developing countries. Many of them have so far taken a neutral stance on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
Ukrainian and Western leaders hope that efforts to win the support of developing countries could culminate in a peace summit later this year at which world leaders would sign up to common principles for resolving the conflict in Ukraine. Such principles, they said, could form the basis for possible future peace talks between Russia and Ukraine that would be in favour of Kyiv.
At the end of June, representatives of India, Turkey and South Africa met with representatives of Ukraine and several major European countries in Copenhagen. They were joined remotely by White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Saudi Arabia and Ukraine have also invited representatives of Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico and Zambia to the Jeddah meeting. It is not yet clear exactly who will attend, but Britain, South Africa, Poland and the European Union have confirmed their participation. The United States is expected to attend, again represented by Sullivan.
Western diplomats say Saudi Arabia was chosen as the venue for the meeting because it maintains close relations with Beijing. The aim is to attract representatives of China, which has close relations with Moscow, to the meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly said that Kyiv will not negotiate peace with Russia until Russian troops withdraw from occupied Ukrainian territories. Moscow, for its part, insists on its demands and does not intend to withdraw from any territory, including the parts of Ukraine that it annexed last year, but the Ukrainian army then regained.
On Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hosted a Russian-African summit earlier this week, did not rule out talks on Ukraine. He said the basis for them should be proposals from China and African leaders. But he also said that declaring a ceasefire would be difficult with the Ukrainian army waging an offensive against Russian troops.
