President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine opened a peace conference in Switzerland on Saturday, joined by Vice President Kamala Harris, aiming to shore up support for Ukraine’s negotiating positions with backing from as many nations as possible.
“We have succeeded in bringing back to the world the idea that joint efforts can stop war and establish a just peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “Everything agreed at the summit today will be part of the peacemaking process.”
But one question hung over the gathering: What is the value of peace talks that are not actually talks between the warring sides?
Even as the two-day conference has emerged as the most widely embraced diplomatic effort to date to end the war, for now, the effort excludes Russia.
The conference, at an Alpine resort near Lucerne, is instead a show of support for some of the points that Ukraine has laid out in its proposal and that it has asserted are necessary to bring a lasting peace.
“I’m here to stand with Ukraine and leaders from around the world in support of a just and lasting peace,” Ms. Harris said at the start of her meeting with Mr. Zelensky. “The United States is committed to helping Ukraine rebuild.”
But Mr. Zelensky’s plan has drawn criticism from some countries, like China and Brazil, that say Russia and Ukraine need to negotiate directly for any chance to end the fighting.
“You don’t negotiate with your friends,” Celso Amorim, the chief foreign policy adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, said in an interview this past week. “You negotiate with your adversaries.”
Mr. Zelensky has said that Ukraine’s intention is to negotiate with Russia collectively — after building consensus among Kyiv’s allies and as many neutral nations as possible. Mr. Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan involves Russia’s withdrawing in full from Ukrainian territory, paying reparations and facing justice over any war crimes.
On Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered his own cease-fire plan, calling for Ukraine to cede territory and for Western nations to lift their economic sanctions. Ukraine denounced Mr. Putin’s suggestion as intended to undermine this weekend’s talks.
At the summit on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, told reporters that there would be “no compromise with independence, no compromise with sovereignty and territorial integrity” in any talks with Russia. The conclusions of the countries gathered this weekend, he said, could be presented to representatives of Russia at a second summit, which has not been scheduled.
As Ukraine worked to build momentum for the Swiss conference, it promoted a gathering that could endorse all 10 of its negotiating positions. But it then dialed them back to three — nuclear safety, food security and humanitarian issues like exchanging prisoners of war and returning Ukrainian children unlawfully taken to Russia — to draw in countries that were reluctant to endorse the points deemed less feasible.
“We have moved away from difficult things that can divide countries, and we have taken only three points for the first summit,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with Central Asian news media last month.
Both Russia and Ukraine are now maneuvering to gain support from other nations for their preferred formats for eventual talks, if they come.
China and Brazil are backing a separate negotiating proposal, and neither of those countries was expected to send a high-level delegation for Ukraine’s conference this weekend. Switzerland said that delegations from 100 countries and organizations, including 57 heads of state and government, were expected to attend.
President Biden, who has already traveled to Europe twice in recent weeks for a D-Day memorial and a Group of 7 summit, is skipping the gathering. Ms. Harris is attending instead.
As she entered the peace conference in Switzerland on Saturday, Ms. Harris appeared to acknowledge Mr. Zelensky’s preferred topics by announcing $500 million in new funding to repair Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The United States also said it would provide $379 million for refugees and displaced people in Ukraine.
A senior American official, who requested anonymity to discuss the private negotiations, said that Ms. Harris, as well as Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who was also attending the conference, would emphasize Mr. Biden’s long-term commitment to Ukraine, despite the coming U.S. election. While Ms. Harris is returning to Washington on Saturday evening, Mr. Sullivan will stay on Sunday to strategize on practical solutions to support the nuclear, energy and food security for Ukraine.
With Russia excluded from the summit, the American official said the success of the conference would be in the attendance of so many nations — essentially giving a show of support for Ukraine and a rebuke to Russia. The idea of a summit with Moscow is “a different matter,” the timing of which should be decided by the Ukrainians, the official said.
The official added that the Biden administration was disappointed that China was not participating in the summit but declined to say whether Washington believed Beijing had discouraged other nations from joining the peace conference, as Mr. Zelensky has claimed.
Brazil, like China, avoided any high-level presence — though Mr. Amorim, the presidential adviser, was in nearby Geneva for a United Nations trade conference. Mr. Amorim said in the interview that peace talks not involving Russia were futile.
“I’m not defending one side or the other, but I, for one, am very clear that nothing will come from this meeting in Switzerland,” he said. “I respect the intentions, but it’s obvious that nothing will happen.”
China has said that 45 countries “responded positively” to the Brazilian and Chinese proposal for talks, without naming the countries. Mr. Amorim said that he had no precise information about how many or which countries supported the conditions, but he noted that the participation of China, as the country with the most influence over Russia, was key.
Ukraine has rejected such talks.
Turkey, another country that has sought to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, was represented by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who met with Mr. Putin at the Kremlin on Tuesday.
A spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry said that his government considered the Swiss talks important, but underlined that a peace conference involving Russia would “have a greater chance of success.”
Oleksii Polegkyi, academic director of the Center for Public Diplomacy in Ukraine, told Ukrainian television news on Thursday that Kyiv’s strategy for the summit could end up being a diplomatic misstep.
The gathering could end, he said, without a statement affirming Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, an absence that could allow traction on territorial concessions in an eventual settlement before extracting anything from Russia in return.
In any case, he said, “our expectations from this summit may be somewhat overstated, because peace will not be achieved through summits.”
But Maria Zolkina, director of conflict studies at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a nongovernmental group, said the value to Ukraine of the diplomacy around the gathering was broader than just the formal effort to shore up support for the three points in Kyiv’s peace plan.
The effort is helping promote Ukraine’s vision of a postwar order in Eastern Europe that would prevent future Russian expansionism, she said, adding that Ukraine wanted to muster support for talks on its terms, “not to start from Chinese, Russian or someone else’s proposals.”
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Jack Nicas from Rio de Janeiro, and Safak Timur from Istanbul. Anastasia Kuznietsova also contributed reporting.
