Not surprisingly, the ventriloquist and his dummy agree on how to respond to the peace initiative coming from a half-dozen African heads of state.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was interviewed by RUSI Senior Associate Fellow Greg Mills upon Kuleba’s return from a tour of Africa, and published the results on June 7 on the website of RUSI—the Royal United Services Institute, which is the oldest of British imperial think tanks. RUSI has distinguished itself by the public call of its deputy director Malcolm Chalmers for provoking a nuclear “Crimean Missile Crisis” with Russia as the only way to defeat Russia.
Their response to the Africa Peace Initiative is cut out of the same cloth. Mills’s article begins by trashing China’s 12-point peace plan because it purportedly “violates several core principles of effective mediation. It also empowers bad faith, by not calling for a Russian withdrawal.” He then asserts that “Kuleba is crystal-clear in laying out the core conditions for Ukraine of any peace deal.” Any peace plan must have two fundamental principles, Kuleba and Mills state: “It should not imply territorial concessions by Ukraine; and it should not lead to the ‘freezing’ of the conflict.”
Kuleba then made his pitch for Africans: “I want [a South African audience] to understand what Russia does now towards Ukraine is exactly what the apartheid regime was doing against Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, trying to turn them into satellites by force.”
Kuleba admits that heretofore that Kiev “was not paying … the level of attention to Africa that it deserves.” But he promised that would change in the future. (https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/setting-negotiating-table-kyivs-view-african-peace-initiative )
