Finland’s president says Ukraine talks may be at ‘end of the road’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) and Finnish President Alexander Stubb in Helsinki, Finland in March 2025.

Photo: AFP Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who has close ties with both US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, fears US-led Ukraine peace talks may be over, he said in an interview published on Thursday. “It may be due to the war in Iran, which is drawing a lot of attention away from the war in Ukraine.

But it may also be that the negotiations have come to a halt because they’ve reached the end of the road and are not making any further progress,” Stubb said in the interview with Norwegian daily VG. “I believe the American negotiators have done everything they could, and that most of it now hinges on one issue: Donetsk and territories.

But the big problem here is that I don’t think Russia wants peace,” he said.

Stubb’s comments come amid other reports that the US-brokered talks between Moscow and Kyiv have stalled.

Ukraine sent a delegation to the United States last weekend in a bid to revive the negotiation process, but the effort yielded no immediate result. “Unfortunately, there is no real progress as yet,” Zelensky said on Tuesday after meeting with his negotiating team back from the talks. “Russia does not want to move towards peace,” he added.

Estonian Prime Minister Kristin Michal on Thursday called for countries to keep up the pressure on Russia, saying it was the only way to bring Moscow to negotiations. “If you don’t take away the money from Russia, if you don’t pressure them … Politeness will not work with Russia, it’s weakness for them,” Michal told reporters as he arrived at a meeting of the leaders of the countries in the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), hosted by Stubb in Helsinki.

The JEF is a military coalition comprising Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK.

原文链接: 南华早报