Ukraine: EU’s Kallas warns against Russian mediator ‘trap’

The European Union‘s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has warned member states not to fall into the Russian “trap” of getting sidetracked by a debate over who might represent the bloc in any future peace talks over Ukraine.

“It’s a trap that Russia wants us to walk into, that we discuss who talks to them, while they are already picking who is suitable and who is not,” she told reporters on the sidelines of an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in the Cypriot port city of Limassol. “Let’s not walk into that trap.”

Earlier this month, Moscow suggested former German chancellor and Kremlin friend Gerhard Schröder as mediator, while Finnish President Alexander Stubb, former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi and even former German chancellor Angela Merkel have also been proposed.

But Kallas quickly dismissed such ideas, saying: “Negotiations [are] always a team effort. You have ‘good cops,’ you have ‘bad cops,’ you have a strategy. The substance is much more important than the who.”

Ukraine is pushing for Europe to play a more forceful role in negotiations, especially with the United States seemingly distracted by the conflict in the Middle East.

“Europe must be involved in the negotiations,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote this month. “It is important for it to have a strong voice and presence in this process, and it is worth determining who will represent Europe specifically.”

But there is still a reluctance for Europe to take over Washington’s role of neutral mediator, with one EU diplomat confiding to the Reuters news agency:

“It is hard to see how the EU could become a mediator or broker in the talks and step in for the US, given how much we have supported Ukraine.”