KYIV — Ukraine’s determination to defend its territorial integrity will never flag, Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi told a press briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday, brushing aside a claim by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff that a permanent peace deal with Russia hangs on Kyiv’s relinquishing five regions currently under Moscow’s control.
“Ukraine is a sovereign country, united within internationally recognized borders. This position of Ukraine is immutable and will never change. I can tell you: never. No matter how many years, months, it will never change. Ukraine, as it was, will be within internationally recognized borders,” Tykhyi said.
Tykhyi once again outlined Ukraine’s three red lines in peace talks with Moscow: that Kyiv will never recognize the occupied territories as Russian; that it will never agree to any limitations on its defense capabilities or foreign aid; and that third countries will not have a veto over Ukraine’s choice of which unions or alliances to join.
“This all is Ukraine’s right under international law, not just a wish list” Tykhyi added. “Russia has no right to dictate anything to Ukraine. It’s an aggression, where there’s a state that was attacked and the attacker state. There should not be equalizing of the two.”
Earlier this week, Witkoff, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 11, said that Russia wants a permanent settlement and that the peace deal Moscow has proposed includes “five territories of Ukraine”.
Witkoff did not specify which territories he meant, but Reuters reported that he had embraced the Russian position in talks with Trump. POLITICO could not independently verify this claim.
Moscow considers Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea that it illegally occupied and annexed in 2014, as Russian territory.
In 2022 Russia conducted sham referendums in four other Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — and annexed all four, even though it still doesn’t fully control those territories.
Since last summer Putin has demanded that Ukraine withdraw from the four regions, including the city of Zaporizhzhia, which was never occupied, and the city of Kherson, whose residents celebrated their liberation by Ukrainian forces in fall 2022.
While Kyiv acknowledges it doesn’t have the military means to recover the occupied territories by force, it hopes that goal can be achieved through diplomacy and international pressure on Russia.
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