A little more momentum was built for a start to peace talks as Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba travelled to Beijing for his first post-invasion meeting with China, and more commentators say a deal is possible.

Well known Russia watcher Timothy Ash, the senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London, published a note saying that momentum for peace talks to start was building. And former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson penned in article in the Daily Mail calling on Ukraine to concede territory to get a ceasefire deal. Johnson was a frequent visitor to Kyiv last year and has been one of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters.

“Lots of interesting developments around Ukraine over the past week or so, that might just suggest that momentum might again be building for peace talks over the next few months,” said Ash in an emailed note.

Adding to the talk of form of a possible deal, Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko, who’s emerged as one of Zelenskiy’s top rivals over the past year, speculated in an interview with Italy’s Corriere Della Serra over the weekend that the Ukrainian leader might agree to territorial compromises with Russia. In his words, “Will he…consider a territorial compromise with Putin?...Zelenskiy will probably have to resort to a referendum. I don't think he can reach such painful and important agreements on his own without popular legitimacy.”

Klitschko also said from mid-December Zelenskiy needs to create a “government of national unity” which could help disperse responsibility for unpopular decisions like mobilization and thus ease their implementation.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, Ukraine is inching towards a ceasefire as pressure builds on Bankova due to the country’s lack of men, money and arms.

Kuleba in China

Kuleba arrived in Beijing on July 23 to meet with his counterpart in his first war-time visit. He is hoping China will put pressure on Russia to end its assault on Ukraine, and could be pushing at an open door.

"China has unshakably reaffirmed its respect for the principle of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Kuleba said in a video post on Instagram. "My Chinese colleague clearly said that he agrees that we need not the illusion of peace, but a just and sustainable peace."

Despite China’s ongoing support of Russia as part of its “no-limits” partnership agreed during Chinese President Xi Jinping trip to Moscow in 2023, Beijing has consistently called for ceasefire talks to start in its international meetings this year.

Kuleba restated Ukraine's consistent position, which consists of a readiness to conduct a negotiation process with the Russian side. However, this is only possible when Moscow will be ready to conduct negotiations in good faith. Still, such readiness is not observed from the Russian side, Kuleba emphasized. 

The Chinese Foreign Ministry indicated that Ukraine is ready for a dialogue with Moscow, but the negotiations should be reasonable, objective, and aimed at achieving lasting peace. 

"Recently, Ukraine and the Russian Federation have been sending signals of their readiness for negotiations to varying degrees. Although the conditions and time are not yet ripe,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Kuleba. 

Kuleba is convinced that a just peace in Ukraine corresponds with China's strategic interests. He offered to discuss bilateral relations "through the prism of Ukraine's future membership in the EU and China's relations with Europe."

China is seen as the best chance for making mediated talks work as Beijing continues to have significant leverage over Putin and the Russian economy as its biggest trade partner.

The Chinese authorities will continue to promote the “peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis” during Kuleba’s visit to the country, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Mao Ning ahead of the visit.

"The Chinese side continues to promote peace and support the strengthening of consensus in the international community with the aim of jointly seeking real ways to settle the [Ukrainian] crisis by political means," she said at a briefing.

The joint Ukraine-China communique pre-meeting suggests that Ukraine could be brought into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that is supposed to connect Asia to Europe by a land route. It also suggested that Ukraine has accepted the “One China policy” and conceded Beijing’s claims on Taiwan, reports Ash.

Kuleba is also talking about the need to take seriously a joint peace talks deal suggested earlier this year jointly by China and Brazil, both Russia’s fellow BRICS members. Previously Ukraine downplayed this suggestion as too favourable for Russia.

The concession also suggests that Zelenskiy’s 10-point peace plan that he floated at the G20 summit in November 2022 is waning. The plan was supposed to be the centrepiece of the Swiss summit, but was cut down to only three of least concession points – food security, nuclear safety and the return of POWs – and even then only 78 of the delegates to the summit would sign the final communiqué – a diplomatic failure.

“The main outcome of the Swiss summit is the death of Zelensky’s “peace formula”, which brings us closer to real peace talks. The failure to rally the Global South behind Ukraine’s cause is more on the US than Ukraine per se,” Leonid Ragozin, a bne IntelliNews columnist, said in a tweet.

Notably, the Saudi foreign minister was also in Kyiv a week earlier – his first visit post-invasion. Both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and China were conspicuously absent from the Swiss peace summit held on June 16-17 and both have considerable sway over Putin and are likely to play key roles in any negotiated settlement. KSA has also consistently called for a ceasefire and even hosted an earlier peace summit last year. In general Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) is playing a much more active and assertive role on the international geopolitical stage.

In Ukraine public sentiment is also turning slowly towards peace. A poll release this week by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that 32% of respondents agreed that Ukraine could give up territory to achieve peace as quickly as possible, up from 10% earlier, while 55% opposed the idea.

Zelenskiy has called for a second peace summit this autumn and has invited both China and Russia to attend in what some hope will formally kick off the process of ending the conflict.

Events moving toward settlement

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban kicked the process off with a series of trips to Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing and America to meet presidential hopeful Donald Trump, as part of his self-proclaimed peace mission.

That was followed by Boris Johnson to Maro Lago to also meet Trump, after which Johnson said he believed that Trump had the will to bring the war to an end and discussed a peace plan that involved arming Ukraine “to the hilt.”

“Notable here that Boris seems to have backed down from his prior hard-ass pro Ukrainian stance of not giving territorial concessions to Russia,” said Ash. “Not sure if all those Boris Johnson roads will now be renamed in Kyiv. But Boris seems to have picked something up here from the Trump team, surely.”

Ukraine also reached a deal to restructure its external debt with bondholders on July 22, which Ash suggests is part of the post-war funding preparations, which hints the war will end sooner than later.

Behind this momentum towards the start of a settlement is the palpable fear that Trump will retake the White House in November, even after US President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in favour of his vice President Kamila Harris.

“Seems that we are seeing momentum, as there is generally fear now that if Trump wins in November, Western support for Ukraine drops off a cliff – better for Ukraine to negotiate from a position of some relative strength before then. Notable now that the West is front-loading disbursements to Ukraine from the $61bn US package agreed by Congress in April,” says Ash.

Ash speculates that Trump’s choice of J D Vance as vice president has been the final straw for China, as they now anticipate “the mother of all trade wars in Trump 2.0.”

As for Putin, he is increasingly believed to want to freeze the war along current lines and get on with the job of rolling back sanctions and ending the fiscal haemorrhaging that is the heavy military spending, according to Reuters sources in the Kremlin. Putin had already gone as far as explicitly offering a ceasefire on the eve of the Swiss peace summit on June 14 along the lines of the April 2022 Istanbul peace deal, where a ceasefire was all but agreed.

Snails-pace aid

Zelenskiy is also clearly becoming frustrated with the slow pace of arms deliveries that has severely handicapped the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) ability to counter Russia increased assault along the whole front line in July.

The Defence Ministry says that the recruitment drive launched in May following a new mobilisation law is going well, but several battalions are in the rear but can’t be deployed due to the lack of weapons needed to supply them. The situation with more powerful weapons is even more frustrating.

“It's been 18 months' and F-16s have not yet arrived,” Zelenskiy loudly complained. Ukraine is yet to receive the first of the two dozen pledged F-16 fighter jets, despite waiting for them for year and a half, Zelenskiy said in an interview with the BBC on July 18.

The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium have pledged a total of 80 F-16s under the fighter jet coalition launched in July 2023, with up to 20 expected to arrive this year. Yet none have arrived to date and they are badly needed to shoot down Russian jets firing up to 800 massive FAB glide bombs at Ukrainian targets each week.

Likewise, Kyiv is desperately short of money. The Ministry of Finance is scrambling to cover a $12bn budget shortfall that is earmarked for arms procurement. A recently approved $50bn loan from the G7 would cover that, but wrangling over terms is still going on and the monies are not expected to arrive until the end of the year. In the meantime, the government is living hand to mouth; the first €1.4bn tranche of profits from the investments of the frozen Central Bank of Russia (CBR) reserve assets are due to be transferred to Kyiv next week and the next $2.2bn IMF Extended Fund Facility (EFF) tranche is also due very soon.

And the prospect of a very dark and cold winter is looming after Russia destroyed 90% of Ukraine’s non-nuclear power generation capacity. Despite the current Herculean efforts being made to repair partially destroyed generators and install new smaller portable generators, supplied by USAID, the World Bank recently said that it will take a minimum of two years to make a dent in the problem.

“With 90% of all non-nuclear power generation destroyed, Ukrainians are facing the harshest winter in living memory. The suggestion that their army could retake any significant chunks of territory in these conditions is ludicrous,” says Ragozin.

The country is already stricken with rolling blackouts and Ukraine’s authorities have warned that blackouts could last 20 hours a day in the winter. Berlin is preparing for another possible million-strong wave of refugees after the heating season starts, one senior German government advisor told bne IntelliNews.