Austria ready to host Russia-Ukraine talks – chancellor
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer has offered Vienna as the venue for peace talks between Moscow and Kiev.
Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow remained open to negotiations and named several countries that could serve as mediators.
“We take note of the Russian president’s statements regarding his openness for peace talks with Ukraine. Any negotiations must take place without preconditions and at eye level,” Nehammer said on Thursday.
“Austria will be ready to support a just and lasting peace based on international law and to serve as a venue for negotiations as the seat of the OSCE,” the chancellor added, referring to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
While Putin has not yet commented on Nehammer’s offer, his remarks in Vladivostok were consistent with Moscow’s long-standing readiness to sit down at the table with Kiev’s legitimate representatives.
As possible mediators for such talks, Putin named China, Brazil, and India, whose leaders “sincerely want to understand the situation.” He also said Moscow had been in touch with them on the matter.
Ukraine scuttled the April 2022 peace talks in Istanbul at the behest of the US and its allies. Kiev has since insisted on holding international “peace summits” without Russia, and based only on Vladimir Zelensky’s “peace formula,” a ten-point wish list that Moscow has rejected as ridiculous.
Putin has presented his own list of prerequisites for a ceasefire, including Ukraine’s total withdrawal from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the lifting of all Western sanctions on Russia.
Nehammer’s offer of talks came on the tenth anniversary of the OSCE mediating the initial Minsk Agreement, which was designed to resolve the dispute between the government in Kiev installed in a US-backed coup and the two Donbass republics that declared independence in response. In December 2022, former German chancellor Angela Merkel claimed that the Minsk Agreements were a ruse to buy Ukraine time to prepare for a war against Russia.
Moscow is technically still a member of the OSCE, although it suspended activities in the organization’s parliamentary assembly in July.
