Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has sharply rejected suggestions that the government in Kyiv should make territorial concessions to Russia to end the war. “Whatever the Russian state does, there will always be someone who says: Let’s take their interests into account,” Zelensky said in a video speech late that evening.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week that Ukraine should cede Crimea, annexed in 2014, to Russia. “One gets the impression that Mr. Kissinger does not have the year 2022 on his calendar, but the year 1938, and that he believes he is not speaking in Davos but in Munich to an audience from that time.” In 1938 Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany concluded a pact in Munich which granted Adolf Hitler land in what was then Czechoslovakia in order to persuade him to refrain from further territorial expansion.
“Those who advise Ukraine to give something to Russia, these ‘great world political figures’, never see the ordinary people, the ordinary Ukrainians, the millions living in the territory they want to trade for an illusory peace.”