A bright spot in a dark time – VG

The State Department confirms that the United States and Russia will meet to discuss the resumption of talks on nuclear weapons.

This is a commander. The leader expresses the position of VG. VG’s political editor answers the leader.

The confirmation from Washington, D.C. Wednesday night is a rare bright spot in a dark time, and even if reservations remain, it is still positive that the two sides express a willingness to meet again at the negotiating table.

Inspections of each country’s military facilities were suspended in March 2020 when the Corona pandemic broke out.

The two sides met for the last time in October 2021, but the talks were again suspended when Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24 of this year.

According to a statement issued by State Department spokesman Ned Price in the US capital, the talks will deal exclusively with the disarmament terms set by the so-called New START Treaty (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), and will not include any discussion related to Ukraine. crisis.

The ongoing war is just the backdrop to the meeting, which is said to take place in only a short time.

The negotiations will be moved to a currently unspecified location in the Middle East, because the Kremlin no longer considers Switzerland to be neutral since the country ended sanctions against Russia.

Therefore, there is reason to believe that the talks, on one level or another, will continue to be related to Ukraine, and that the parties are using the opportunity to discuss possible scenarios.

The Wall Street Journal On Monday, it reported that President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had already held secret talks about nuclear weapons with his Russian counterpart, Yuri Ushakov, for several weeks.

At the same time, the Biden administration, according to Washington PostTry to start a dialogue between the Ukrainian and Russian authorities.

Jake Sullivan also met the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who refuses to negotiate with the Russians as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power.

Zelensky has good reasons not to talk to Putin, nor to enter into any kind of ceasefire that could give the heavily-stressed Russian army breathing room to regroup. Ukraine’s president knows better than anyone that a dictator in the Kremlin cannot be trusted.

At the same time, he could not refuse to sit at the negotiating table indefinitely. On Monday evening, Zelensky barely opened the door, asking the outside world to “force Russia into real peace talks.”

However, conditions were set: a complete Russian withdrawal from the occupied territories, compensation for war damage, and the prosecution of war criminals.

The Kremlin is unlikely to agree to all of this.

But it was also no coincidence, that it was the Russian state-controlled media that first reported that talks were underway on the New START agreement.

In the stalemate in Ukraine, there is reason to believe that the parties are looking for all imaginable channels to find solutions that can contribute to ending war and suffering, and guarantee Ukraine’s freedom and independence.