Blanar: Anyone Who Thought Summit Would End Conflict was Naive

(STVR, 'Sobotne dialogy', 16 August) Speaking on STVR's politics programme 'Sobotne dialogy' (Saturday Dialogues), Foreign Affairs Minister Juraj Blanar (Smer-SD) called the Alaska summit the first step towards peace, stressing the need for dialogue. However, anyone who thought the summit would end the conflict was naive, he said. "I think that anyone who thought that one summit would end this complicated conflict in Ukraine was very naive. However, it's very important that the process has started and that discussion is underway, since there's no military solution to this conflict, just a diplomatic one, and the only one who managed to get the two sides, Ukrainian and Russian one, to the table was the administration of Donald Trump, and we've been supporting it from the very beginning," said Blanar. He pointed out that Trump immediately informed the EU leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the result of the summit, thus showing that he was not leaving the Union out of the peace process. Opposition MP and parliamentary foreign affairs committee vice-chair Tomas Valasek (Progressive Slovakia/PS), also on the show, responded that the negotiations alone are not enough, as he believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't interested in an agreement and is striving to weaken the sovereignty of countries, including Slovakia. In this context, Valasek stated that pressure and reasons must be brought in dialogues with Russia that would make Putin to change his position. He described Putin's demands as maximalist. "These demands include that, for example, Slovakia shouldn't have the right to freely decide with whom and how we can defend ourselves, they want to make us second-category allies. That is not my assumption, they sent it to us in the form of a treaty between NATO and the Russian Federation in December 2021," Valasek explained. According to him, Putin indirectly repeated this position at the summit, but Slovak diplomacy did not respond to it at all, which he views as scandalous. Blanar noted that, according to Trump, the leaders at the summit agreed that the goal was to conclude a peace agreement, not just a ceasefire, as this is often violated. He also said that Slovakia's position on the 19th package of anti-Russian sanctions will depend on whether it harms Slovak interests or not. ko