Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Zelensky shared his envisaged path to peace on Monday where he revealed that four more rounds of talks on the Ukrainian Conflict are planned for the coming months after the most recent one last month in Switzerland. The next one will take place in Qatar and cover energy security, then there’ll be one in Turkiye about free navigation in the Black Sea. After that, a meeting on prisoner exchanges will take place in Canada around September, followed by another Swiss-like event in November.

It’s during this fifth event that Zelensky said that he hopes Russia can participate, though Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin already ruled that out last week on the grounds that his country won’t attend any meetings where it’s talked down to and pressured to comply with ultimatums.

Nevertheless, Zelensky’s shifting rhetoric and the timing with which he expects everything to unfold are interesting developments in and of themselves, and they’ll now be analyzed to place them into perspective.

His roadmap was shared shortly after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “peace mission”, which took him to Ukraine, Russia, China, and the US, and suggests that Zelensky and his most reliable Western partners are seriously concerned about the possibility of a non-Western peace process emerging.

It was explained here how this could take the form of more inclusive Chinese-organized but Brazilian-fronted talks ahead of and/or during the G20 Summit in Rio.

In the event that they’re held, then they could create the diplomatic momentum for coercing Ukraine into compromising on its unrealistic maximalist objective of reconquering its lost territories, not to mention having an international tribunal for alleged Russian “war criminals” after the conflict ends. That’s because the Sino-Brazilian duopoly could foreseeably marshal most of the Global South to attend their meetings and get them to support their joint six-point peace consensus for freezing the conflict.

Considering China’s interest in presenting itself as a global diplomatic force to be reckoned with, it’s unlikely that it would participate in any of the upcoming four meetings that Zelensky described just like how it declined to attend last month’s one in Switzerland.

Its closest partners in the Global South might follow its lead as well, or if they still take part in the event, then they might refuse to sign any joint statement just like Brazil declined to do during the latest one.

Without China’s participation and absent the support of leading Global South countries, many of whom also didn’t lend their signature to last month’s declaration, everything that Zelensky has planned over the coming months is just a political fantasy for perception management purposes.

He and those behind him know that they need to at least superficially reach out to the Global South, hence the upcoming meetings in Qatar and Turkiye, and they also know that they can’t continue excluding Russia either.

This explains those two’s roles in this envisaged diplomatic sequence and Zelensky’s publicly stated interest in inviting Russia to the next Swiss-like event in November, though the first part won’t make any difference in changing the Global South’s approach while Galuzin already ruled out the second. The fact of the matter is that any talks that include ultimatums to Russia and in which China doesn’t participate are doomed to fail so all of this is yet another soft power stunt that won’t amount to anything.