Rejecting Peaceful Negotiations With Russia, Vice President Zelensky's Assistant: Bad Peace By Combating Ukrainian Territory

JAKARTA - Kyiv rejected comments from former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Ukraine should seek a peace plan negotiated with Russia to reduce the risk of launching into another world war.

The war continues to escalate in Ukraine, along with the Russian invasion that began on February 24. Behind, Kyiv applied to join NATO, while Russia annexed the areas of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, through a referendum that Ukraine and the international community considered invalid.

Kissinger proposed peaceful negotiations to end the conflict, avoiding world war.

In this regard, Ukrainian Vice President Mykhailo Podolyak said Kissinger did not understand the nature of this war, nor its impact on world order.

"The concept requested by the former foreign minister, but feared to say it out loud, simply: calming the aggressor at the expense of parts of Ukraine with non-aggression guarantees against other countries in Eastern Europe," Podolyak wrote on Telegram, launching The National News December 19.

"All proponents of a simple solution must remember things that are clear: any agreement with the devil, a bad peace at the expense of Ukrainian territory, will be a victory for Putin and a recipe for success for autocrats around the world," he said.

Earlier, Kissinger said it was closer to peace negotiations in Ukraine to reduce the risk of another devastating world war.

Kissinger, an architect of the Cold War Detente policy against the Soviet Union as Secretary of State under Republican President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has met with Vladimir Putin several times since he first became president in 2000.

"The time is getting closer to building on the strategic changes that have been achieved and integrating them into a new structure to achieve peace through negotiations," Kissinger wrote in The Spectator magazine.

"The peace process must connect Ukraine with NATO. Alternative neutrality is no longer meaningful," he continued in an article entitled How to avoid another world war.

Kissinger said in May he proposed a ceasefire in which Russia would retreat to the frontline before the February 24 invasion, but Crimea would be the subject of a "negotiation".

Kissinger, 90, stated that if it was proven impossible to return to the status quo set in 2014, an internationally supervised referendum in territory claimed by Russia could be an option.

But Kissinger warned that the desire to make Russia 'impotential' or even seek Russia's disbandment could cause chaos. Neither Ukraine nor any Western country recommends any path.

"The dissolution of Russia or its destruction of its capabilities for strategic policy, could change its territory covering 11 time zones into a contested vacuum," Kissinger said.

"Competitive people may decide to resolve their disputes with violence. Other countries may try to expand their claims by force. All of these dangers will be exacerbated by the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons that make Russia one of the two largest nuclear powers in the world," he concluded.