MPs told the Canadian audience that Ukraine would negotiate with Russia on the battlefield
Russia needs to be defeated, isolated and punished for waging war against Ukraine – and Western politicians need to accept this and start thinking about what might happen once the fighting stops.
Member of Parliament, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Ukraine’s Integration into the European Union, Ivanna Klimpus-Tsintsadze spoke at an event organized by the non-partisan Parliamentary Center, which supports democratic governance, in Ottawa.
“Russia is just a monster, just an evil that needs to be defeated. It is black and white,” Klimpus-Tsintsadze said in his passionate, extemporaneous speech to the audience of MPs and politicians.
Klympush-Tsintsadze and fellow Ukrainian parliamentarian Maria Ionova dodged a question from the audience about whether Ukrainian drones were responsible for recent attacks on Russian airfields, including those that host nuclear-capable bombers.
These attacks, which Ukraine has never acknowledged, have raised fears of escalation.
“We would like them to be our drones flying about 600 kilometers, I would also like to, but I have no idea,” Klimpus-Tsintsadze answered the audience’s question.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has faced constant pressure from the United States and other European countries to consider peace talks with Moscow.
Ionova, a member of the Verkhovna Rada’s foreign policy and inter-parliamentary cooperation committee, said that for now Ukraine is satisfied with allowing its armed forces to negotiate.
“More than 80% of our people do not support negotiations with Russia. “The best negotiators, the best negotiators are our armed forces. They are the best negotiators.”
‘[Russia] should be isolated and… punished”
As Ukraine prepares a ten-point plan for negotiations with Russia, Ionova and Klimpus-Tsintsadze said that there can be no talk of peace without justice for the innocent victims of the war and security for Ukraine.
That last point appeared to be a subtle dig at French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently said Russia needed security guarantees to end the war.
Klimpus-Tsintsadze hated this idea.
“Russia must be defeated. This means that Russia should weaken,” he said. “He needs to be isolated and punished, and only then will we – all together – maybe have some kind of Russia that we can talk about and deal with.”
He said he believes that Western politicians still do not understand what can and should happen after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.
Klimpus-Tsintsadze is the second Eastern European politician to send such a message to Ottawa recently. Belarus’ exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya made similar comments to reporters two weeks ago when she met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Minister Melanie Jolie.
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Given Ukraine’s long and painful struggle to oust Russian troops, and the relentless missile strikes and drone strikes that are currently disrupting the country’s power grid, the notion of “what comes next” may seem far-fetched right now. .
Klimpus-Tsintsadze was asked if the goal should be regime change in Russia. According to him, the problem presented by Russia to the world is deeper than the government of President Vladimir Putin from a social and political point of view.
“Regime change in the Russian Federation will not lead to lasting peace and Russia giving up its imperial ambitions,” he said.
“We should not be afraid to make an additional effort, an intellectual effort to think about what kind of Russia and what kind of borders will be after this war.”
Matthew Schmidt is an Eastern European expert at the University of Connecticut in New Haven. According to him, what the Ukrainian MPs are proposing amounts to a “multi-generational problem” and Western governments should ask themselves what is possible.
“What will we do? We will drag Putin [International Criminal Court]? No one thinks this is real, will we get reparations from Russia? No,” Schmidt admitted that both goals were legitimate and that Ukraine had the right to pursue them.
He agreed that the West did not think enough about what a Russian defeat and a Ukrainian victory would mean for Eastern Europe and the rest of the world.
At the same time, he says, Ukrainians should start asking themselves the hard questions: How far are they willing to go?
“As long as they demand fair reparations, for example, what they are entitled to, but historically very rarely, ends up like World War I,” Schmidt said.
“The more effort you put into this thing, the more likely you are to end up with a non-democratic regime in Russia, I think the more likely you are to end up with a reactionary regime.”
