President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly in New York in 2024. Photo: Sourced
President Cyril Ramaphosa has invited President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to South Africa for a state visit and is hoping it will happen soon, his office said this week while the United States sidelined and insulted the Ukrainian leader.
“The president wants that visit to happen as soon as possible,” said Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya.
The formal invitation was extended on 15 January, and followed meetings between Ramaphosa and Zelenskiy on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September and the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in November.
No date has been agreed, Magwenya said, but Ramaphosa has asked diplomats to prioritise preparations for a visit.
Confirmation of the invitation came after the US began peace talks with Russia on the war in Ukraine on Tuesday and President Donald Trump signalled that he may abandon long-standing US military and financial support for Kyiv.
Ukraine was not invited to that meeting in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, and Zelenskiy’s pleas for a meeting with Trump and some coordination prior to talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin were shunned.
This prompted apprehension not only in Ukraine but in Europe that the Trump administration was moving to foist a peace accord on Zelenskiy that favours Putin, a perception that firmed as the week wore on.
It was informed not only by Ukraine’s exclusion from the talks but by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks last week that Washington would not support Ukraine’s aspirations to join Nato and that a return to Ukraine’s borders before 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, were “unrealistic”.
Trump, for his part, suggested that Russia may have a right to Ukrainian territory seized when Russia invaded the country on 24 February 2022 because “they fought for that land”.
After the meeting in Saudi Arabia, Trump said Ukraine had started the war, the biggest in Europe since World War II.
Zelenskiy responded to Trump’s revision of history by saying: “I would like to have more truth with the Trump team.” He added that the US president was living “in a web of disinformation”.
Trump then called Zelenskiy “a dictator” and on Wednesday threatened him in a social media post, saying he had “better move fast” to make peace or “he is not going to have a country left”.
Magwenya said Ramaphosa believed that there could be no credible peace process without Ukraine’s participation, and that it was not for other nations to dictate the terms of negotiated settlement.
“No peace can hold unless all parties are involved and they have to be involved equally in the process. That is the only way in which you can resolve a conflict in a manner that is long-lasting,” he said.
“All parties must have a seat around the table. We don’t believe that anybody who is involved in a conflict should be excluded in a process and we know this from our own experience, from when we negotiated our own political settlement that culminated in the constitutional democracy that we are so proud of.”
Magwenya said that where Ramaphosa could help to facilitate negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, he would be “more than happy to do so”.
“But what we will not do as South Africa is to start dictating the terms,” he added.
“The nitty-gritty details must be discussed by the actual parties that are involved in the conflict. There cannot be any external, dictatorial approach to how the parties resolve the conflict.”
The falling out between Washington and Kyiv came as South Africa was preparing to host a meeting of foreign ministers of G20 nations in Johannesburg on Thursday.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is snubbing the meeting as part of the ongoing diplomatic row between Washington and Pretoria, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend.
Magwenya confirmed Ramaphosa was expecting a courtesy call from Lavrov, suggesting that he would brief the president on the talks in Riyadh, which were officially led by Rubio.
Leaders of major European countries on Monday held a hastily arranged summit in Paris, prompted by Trump’s rapprochement with Putin and decision to embark on negotiations on Russia’s war in Ukraine without including them.
Magwenya said it was imperative that Europe be given a seat at the negotiating table.
“We believe that all interested parties must be heard, and that includes Europe. A peace deal between Russia and Ukraine should not exclude any party. It should include the US, it should include Europe.”
Foreign diplomats in South Africa said they expected the US initiative on the war in Ukraine to be discussed on the sidelines of the G20 meeting.
The event is an opportunity for South Africa, which holds the year-long presidency of the G20, to shore up consensus around an agenda that focuses strongly on equitable development and sustainability — themes Rubio dismissed as proof of the host nation’s “anti-Americanism” — and to deepen alliances with European nations.
European diplomats last week expressed support for South Africa’s leadership of the world’s top forum for economic cooperation, with European Commission president Antonio Costa saying the EU was committed to deepening ties with South Africa, as a “reliable and predictable” partner.
Officials said while the government would not seek to isolate the US after Trump suspended all donor funding to South Africa, the tone adopted recently by Hegseth and US Deputy President JD Vance would not hurt its search for common ground with European partners.
At the 61st Munich Security Conference last Friday, Vance told European leaders to stop marginalising far-right parties, after his meeting with the ultra-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has not been banned but kept out of ruling coalitions by the country’s so-called firewall against extremism.
Vance was rebuked by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said his country would not take directions on how to run its democracy or accommodate a party that minimised Nazi crimes.
“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Scholz said.
In his presidential order cutting off aid to South Africa, Trump reiterated his support for Afrikaners, who he says are a white minority group who face racial persecution under post-apartheid rule.
Source:
mg.co.za
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