Russia may end up in “temporary” control of some territory, Czech President Petr Pavel has said
Kiev should accept the possibility of Russia temporarily controlling some territories as a likely outcome of the conflict, Czech President Petr Pavel has said.
Pavel, a vocal supporter of Ukraine, told the New York Times that neither Moscow nor Kiev seems capable of achieving their most ambitious goals.
“To talk about a defeat of Ukraine or defeat of Russia, it will simply not happen,” Pavel told the US outlet in the interview published on Monday. “So the end will be somewhere in between.”
“The most probable outcome of the war will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily,” he added, explaining that the “temporary thing” could last for years.
Vladimir Zelensky’s government has ruled out any peace agreement that does not restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders – which would include Crimea, as well as the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye. Russia has consistently stated that the status of Russian regions is non-negotiable and that Ukraine needs to “acknowledge reality” before a ceasefire can happen, let alone a peace treaty.
Crimea, a region with a historical connection to Russia that was assigned to Ukraine in 1954, voted to rejoin Russia in 2014, following the US-backed change in leadership in Kiev. The two Donbass republics decided to separate from Ukraine, but Russia declined to recognize them until February 2022, when Kiev rejected the Minsk peace process. The DPR and LPR voted to join Russia, along with most of Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, in September 2023.
With growing war weariness “growing everywhere” and “populists” like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Robert Fico of Slovakia undermining EU unity, according to Pavel, Ukrainians need to be “realistic about the support that they can achieve.”
The Times acknowledged that the Czech presidency is “largely ceremonial” but described Pavel’s views as “generally aligned” with PM Petr Fiala. Meanwhile, nearly two thirds of Czechs would support a peace in Ukraine if it meant Kiev ceding some territory, while 54% were opposed to Prague’s “ammunition initiative” to supply artillery shells to Ukraine, according to polling from earlier this year.
Pavel has stated that the Czechs had “no other option but to support Ukraine at this time,” because Prague opposed the world “where one country can invade another just because it is bigger and stronger.”
The Czech Republic joined NATO in March 1999, twelve days before the US-led bloc launched an unauthorized air war against Serbia and Montenegro on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.