On the eve of Ukrainian acting President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with President Donald Trump on Dec. 28, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov firmly restated the Russian position about Ukrainian peace negotiations. In an interview with Russia’s 60 Minutes TV show, Ryabkov explained that Russia had seen “references to a 20-point plan appearing in Ukrainian public groups yesterday. We know that this plan is radically different, if you can even call it a plan, from the 27 points we have been working on in contacts with the US side in recent weeks, starting in early December.”
Ryabkov continued, in response to a question on whether the rights of Russian-speakers are being taken into account: “The Americans have agreed that we should adhere to the framework established in Anchorage, and fill it up with specifics…. Accordingly, from that follows the direct inference that they have accepted this…. The political will to remain within the framework established in Anchorage is not merely fundamental for us. It is an imperative. We cannot depart from that framework. Otherwise, there will not only be no stable agreement; it will simply be impossible to achieve any agreement at all.”
The Anchorage framework centered on addressing the underlying causes of the war (as opposed to simply proclaiming an immediate ceasefire), including the need to take Russia’s security interests into account as well as Ukraine’s, based on renewed channels of respectful communication between the U.S. and Russia. Ryabkov reiterated to 60 Minutes Russia’s oft-repeated position: “Without a correct resolution of the problems that are the root causes of this crisis, the problems that need to be resolved—without that, it will be impossible to reach a final agreement.”
