At the same time, the former US Secretary of State warned against attempts to demand territorial concessions from Kyiv to Moscow.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger< /strong> confirmed that the Russian-Ukrainian war should end at the negotiating table, and warned against trying to put pressure on Kyiv in order to obtain territorial concessions from Moscow.
Kissinger voiced this opinion in the podcast director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, CNN correspondent David Axelrod The Ax Files.
“This conflict must end at the negotiating table, negotiations are necessary. The war should not drag on indefinitely, freezing the conflict will lead to an escalation like in the First World War,” said the former Secretary of State.
Kissinger called for an acceptable outcome of the negotiations and to start working in this direction.
“But Russia should not profit from the war against Ukraine,” the politician warned. – Russian troops must return to the line that existed before February 24, therefore, the Russian Federation will have to give up 15-20% of the Ukrainian territory that it captured.”
The former state secretary considers the disintegration of the Russian Federation into several independent states almost inevitable after the war. And he calls on the West to think about how to build relations with the aggressor after the war.
“Then the NATO countries will have to decide how to build relations with Russia, whether it will be part of Europe, whether it is possible now, whether it will be an outpost of China on the outskirts of Europe,” he explained.
At the same time Kissinger is sure that Ukraine, which is not formally a member of NATO, will maintain closer relations with the Alliance after the end of the war than before it. This will be facilitated by the West's supply of weapons to repel Russian aggression.
Previously, the politician held a slightly different point of view. Speaking via video link at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May, he called for settlement negotiations to begin in Ukraine within the next two months, before relations between Europe and the Russian Federation finally deteriorate. A number of Western media saw these words as a call for concessions to the aggressor and criticized him.
Read also: Erdogan offers to return to negotiations with the Russian Federation — Zelensky opposes
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