Denmark wants to host Ukraine peace summit in July

Denmark is willing to host peace talks between Ukraine and Russia next July, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Monday according to media reports.

“If Ukraine finds that the time has come to have such a meeting, that would be fantastic,” Rasmussen said upon arriving at the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, Reuters reported.

“Then Denmark would obviously like to host the meeting” which would need engagement from “countries like India, Brazil and China,” the foreign minister said, adding that it was “hard for [him] to see” Russia attending.

Although Moscow and Kyiv have said they were open to peace talks, they hold diverging views on what the starting point of negotiations should be.

Ukraine has set the restoration of its territorial integrity, as well as “building security architecture in the Euro-Atlantic space, including guarantees for Ukraine” as preconditions for peace talks.

Russia has said Ukraine needed to be “neutral,” refrain from joining NATO and the EU, and wants the international community to recognize the territories it annexed for peace talks to begin.

Several countries from the Global South have sought to position themselves as intermediaries for peace talks in recent months.

China and Brazil have both sent emissaries to Moscow and Kyiv, while India has said it was ready to contribute to a peace process — but Ukraine’s Western partners have raised doubts over their credibility.

Some Western leaders have slammed Beijing’s attempts as unrealistic, given its position as one of Moscow’s top allies.

In April, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sparked fury among Ukraine’s Western allies by saying they were prolonging the war by supplying Kyiv with weapons.

Lula was supposed to meet his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the G7 summit in Japan over the weekend, but the meeting could not take place because Zelenskyy was late, Reuters reported.