U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Paris on Thursday, April 17th to meet French President Emmanuel Macron about crafting a Ukraine ceasefire, as Washington and Europe seek common ground on ending the fighting.
Top Ukrainian officials were also in the French capital to meet EU and U.S. delegations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the Paris talks participants to lean on Russia to agree to a ceasefire.
“Russia uses every day and every night to kill. We must put pressure on the killers … to end this war and guarantee a lasting peace,” Zelensky said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday dismissed the Paris talks when asked what Moscow expected from them. “Unfortunately we see from Europeans a focus on continuing the war,” he said.
Europe, which clearly has no strategy on how to end the war, has unsurprisingly been sidelined so far by the U.S. regarding the ceasefire and peace talks.
Britain and France have been trying to scrape together a ‘coalition of the willing,’ a group of European countries who would potentially deploy troops to support and secure any future Ukraine ceasefire but so far have failed to gain support for such a venture.
