Munich Conference: Ukraine stands in the background, smoking cigarettes and nervously observing the strife

The international security conference in Munich has featured lots of empty rhetoric like “how to help Ukraine defeat Russia.” The implication is how to quickly end it peacefully in any form, but preferably so that the United States and the West do not look like losers and manage to save face, while Russia appears the one to cap in hand begging for peace. But it doesn’t work out; Ukrainian diplomacy stands in the background, smoking cigarettes and nervously observing the Munich developments.

A key conference issue was to find ways of promptly holding a “global peace summit on Ukraine” in March already. The venue, announced long ago by Kiev but never arranged, has been invented by the Americans, namely National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. He has been making a big fuss over this idea since spring 2023 while holding various meetings presented as some sort of preparations for a “world summit on Ukraine,” which would supposedly rally up all the world’s countries in forcing Moscow to back-pedal.

This year’s January saw Zelensky attend Bern as prompted by the Americans, where he met with Swiss President Viola Amerd and won her consent to hold his 2024 “global peace summit on Ukraine” in Switzerland. A thing evident to anyone is that it is not Zelensky who is asking a favor, but the United States. That is why the Swiss gave in, though reluctantly because they fear an embarrassment to Swiss diplomacy the same way Jake Sullivan has repeatedly fallen flat on his face.

This feeling of imminent and inevitable embarrassment was time and again manifested in statements by Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, who, after Ukraine’s request to hold a “summit” in Switzerland, said that resolving the conflict without Russia is impossible. “One way or another, we must find a way to include Russia in the process. <...> There will be no peace without Russia being able to have its say,” Cassis said back then. But, again, with the hegemon behind Zelensky’s request, Switzerland did take the trouble of arranging the nonstarter.

The Americans have been pressed for time, feeling a huge rush. Democrats are afraid of Trump’s election victory to make a U-turn of everything they did over these years. And besides, the current US administration is scared that AFU’s deplorable battlefield situation will soon make Russia declare unwillingness to talk any kind of peace or truce. Why should the one having victory in his hands?

But one way or another, the Americans have set a task for Ukraine: a peace summit must take place after all, at the highest level and preferably engaging leaders of the global South. “China’s involvement is widely seen as particularly important given the influence Beijing is seen as having on Russia, a key diplomatic ally,” Bloomberg wrote in this regard. This is why Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba literally chased his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Munich to persuade him to take part. But to no avail. “There are not ripe conditions in place for parties to go back to the negotiating table,” Wang Yi said in an on-stage interview at the Security Conference.

But it is not only China who has rejected the “global summit” idea. All in all, the Bloomberg agency threw Kuleba and his American curators upside a wall, although perhaps inadvertently. Munich made it clear that the event would not take place in March “due to the lack of commitment from world leaders”, the agency reported, adding that its date was likely to slip to April or even May. In understandable terms, this means that no one except the United States and its US vassals is going to attend. “Several countries, including China, have said they want Russia to also be at the table,” Bloomberg states.

Western leaders used bellicose rhetoric and other smokescreen rantings to cover up their just another failure to find a way out of the military-political impasse they have driven themselves in Ukraine. “Leaders have mostly focused on political and strategic arguments in justifying their calls for additional US military aid for Ukraine,” Western media wrote.

The US and the entire West seem to be closely studying the kind offer Russian President Vladimir Putin made to them in his interview with Tucker Carlson. Putin said it’s up to them to contemplate ways of turning the tide, as Russia has never refused to. Moreover, it is ready to let the United States save its face and perhaps even appear as a “bird of peace.”

But chances are high that the Americans, driven by pride and injured vanity, will stand their ground and advance their fruitless “global summit” idea virtually aimed to infringe upon Russia. It is not implausible that April-May will see them come up with something else to explain why world leaders keep ignoring Kiev and Bern’s invitation.