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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his government was willing to discuss becoming a neutral country as part of a peace deal with Russia.
Zelensky also said that any similar deal would have to go through a referendum in Ukraine.
He has made similar expressions in the past, but rarely so strongly and explicitly.
Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have arrived in Istanbul, Turkey, to resume the first face-to-face talks after a two-week hiatus.
What did it say specifically?
“Security guarantees, neutrality, non-nuclear states … we are ready to discuss these topics, these are the key points,” Zelensky said in a video interview with an independent Russian journalist.
Zelensky said any deal on the subject would require face-to-face talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and security assurances that Ukraine would not be attacked again would be necessary.
Zelensky, who answered questions in Russian throughout the interview, said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had destroyed Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine.
Later, in a video address to the nation, Zelensky said Ukraine sought “immediate peace.”
What does neutral mean?
A country takes a neutral position, which means that the country will not be militarily aligned with any other country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long demanded Ukraine’s neutrality and pledged not to join the NATO military alliance.
Putin hopes to reverse this situation, calling the collapse of the Soviet Union a “historic disintegration of Russia”, claiming that Russians and Ukrainians are one ethnic group and denying Ukraine has a long history.
Ukrainian intelligence says Russia intends to split Ukraine in two, like North and South Korea, splitting Ukraine into two countries.
But Zelensky’s senior adviser Alexander Rodnyansky told the BBC Ukraine would not give any territory to Russia.
“Of course we don’t want to give up territory, we don’t even talk about it,” Rodnyansky told BBC Radio 4.
“Ask the people who live there for a long time to know that they don’t want to live in Russia, how can we leave them behind?”
Analysis by BBC foreign affairs correspondent Paul Adams:
The possibility of Ukraine becoming a neutral country is not a new issue, having been discussed by Russian and Ukrainian officials for at least the past two weeks.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken on the topic in perhaps the clearest way yet.
It is clear that if Ukraine becomes such a neutral country in the future, there will be no room for NATO membership.
Joining NATO was written into the Ukrainian constitution in 2019, so to remove these elements from the Ukrainian constitution, a referendum is needed to do so. At a time when public opinion for joining NATO has risen to an unprecedented high, Ukraine needs to be It would be a very painful decision for the people to give up joining NATO.
The key question is what kind of security guarantees are possible in exchange for giving up being part of a Western ally.
Ukrainian officials insist the so-called security guarantees must go further than the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which offered Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons.
Ukraine wants to determine the exact terms of the security guarantees, including which countries will come to defend Ukraine in the event of any future Russian aggression.
As for what it means to maintain neutrality, there are many different descriptions, and finding a neutral version that meets the expectations of both Ukraine and Russia is not so simple.
Also, where exactly is the Ukrainian border? Zelensky said the Russian army must retreat to the position before Russia launched a full-scale invasion attack on February 24.
He said Ukraine would not retake the Donbass or Crimea by force, but Ukrainian officials were not ready to give up territory that Russia has controlled (directly or indirectly) since 2014.