Ukraine negotiator tells BBC how it feels to sit over the table from Russia
For eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, this monitoring role was played by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe - a group whose limited resources and lack of enforcement mechanisms rendered it largely incapable of preventing an escalation."It was quite an achievement [for them] just to have two UAVs flying over the territory," Kyslytsya said. "It's kind of the Flintstones era compared to what we have today."In comparison, recent reports suggest that as many as 12,000 drones are operating over the single city of Pokrovsk at any one time.I asked Kyslytsya, who is also a former UN ambassador, how he managed to sit across the table from emissaries from a leader in the Kremlin who has been willing to sacrifice more than a million of his own men to subjugate Ukraine.He told me he'd had years of practice."I saw much worse. I spent five years in New York, three of them before the full-scale invasion. I would sit in the room with the enemy on a regular basis."One evening is seared in his memory: 23 February 2022.In the middle of an emergency UN Security Council meeting, convened to discuss the urgent crisis in Ukraine, the ambassador got word that his country was under attack.At the same time, seven time zones to the east in Kyiv, I remember hearing the first distant explosions as Russia's all-out assault on Ukraine began.Amid scenes of agonising drama, Kyslytsya tried to get Russia's ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, to call his boss, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, to seek assurances that Russian troops would not invade."I've already said everything I know today," Nebenzia replied, according to Kyslytsya. "I'm not going to wake Minister Lavrov at this time."Everyone's lives changed at that moment. Kyslytsya stayed at the UN for another three years before returning to Kyiv.If the delegations meet again in Geneva on Thursday, he'll be there, still thrashing out the contours and mechanics of a ceasefire but waiting all the while for the most important part of the jigsaw to fall into place."The war could be stopped by just one call of one person to his military chief of staff," he said."But apparently, the Kremlin dictator [Russian President Vladimir Putin] is not up to stopping the war for the time being."
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