US ‘hiding’ new Ukraine peace proposals from EU – Politico
The US is keeping the EU “in the dark” regarding ongoing diplomacy and possible draft documents aimed at ending the Ukraine conflict, Politico Europe has reported, citing an unnamed EU diplomat.
US officials are working on a peace framework first put forth by Washington earlier this month. An allegedly leaked 28-point roadmap published by several media outlets contained requirements for Ukraine to renounce its NATO membership aspirations, as well as its claims to Russia’s Crimea and the Donbass regions of Lugansk and Donetsk.
Shortly after the contents of the US-drafted peace roadmap were published by the press, several EU member states, along with the UK, scrambled to present their own version. Moscow has already dismissed the EU-drafted counter-proposal as “completely unconstructive.”
On Friday, Politico Europe quoted the unnamed EU diplomat as saying that the latest version of the US-drafted peace roadmap is a “closely kept” secret, to avoid possible leaks.
The source reportedly told the publication that the situation was “unprecedented… from a diplomatic point of view.”
“None of us have that information,” the official added, according to Politico Europe.
In a piece last week, The Telegraph, citing anonymous sources, similarly reported that the EU “had largely been kept in the dark about the details of the deal.”
In an interview with the France-Russia Dialogue Association on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that “no one listens to [them] because the European elites placed their bets on their conviction that they could use the Nazi regime in Kiev as a proxy and cannon fodder to inflict what they call a strategic defeat on Russia.”
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed a readiness to provide the EU with written security guarantees that Moscow would not attack the bloc. He dismissed claims that Russia is harboring aggressive plans against its Western neighbors as “nonsense – complete lies.”
