(Warsaw) If the heads of state and delegations of some 90 countries around the world are meeting in Switzerland this weekend to discuss a way out of the war in Ukraine, it is thanks to one person above all: Volodymyr Zelensky.
For months, the Ukrainian leader, experienced in the exercise of communication, has led a diplomatic offensive, mixing charm, coercion, advocacy and threats targeting the powerful of the world so that they are there, alongside Ukraine for a conference on peace, and show Russia, excluded from the meeting, that it is on the wrong side of History.
The presence of dozens of countries, including those known as the South, traditionally rather close to Moscow, at a time when Ukraine is in difficulty on the front, is a first success.
“It is quite remarkable that around a hundred countries are going to a peace summit in which the main instigator of the conflict is not participating,” underlines Max Bergmann, a former US State Department official who now heads the Europe program. , Russia and Eurasia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
For him, it is a “diplomatic masterstroke” from Kyiv.
William Courtney, a former US diplomat, also hails a “huge success”: “I don’t see any other middle power, like Saudi Arabia or Brazil, that has done anything comparable.”
Because Volodymyr Zelensky has made mobilizing world leaders for the June 15-16 conference a priority.
In recent weeks, he has visited 16 countries, including the Middle East and Asia, regions where there is no shortage of friends of Moscow.
On the eve of a G7 Summit in Italy, he was in Saudi Arabia, an ally of the United States, but also an oil partner of the Kremlin. Before that, we saw it in Singapore, the Philippines and Qatar, in addition to the multitude of European capitals already won over to its cause.
During his meetings with heads of state, in front of parliaments or during conferences, he uses charm, praising his hosts.
“I am grateful to President (Emmanuel) Macron for always striving to find the best solution to protect us and all of Europe. I appreciate the bravery of his decisions and the leadership of France,” he said during the commemorations of the Normandy Landings.
But he also knows how to be much rougher. Even with his greatest ally, the American president, Joe Biden.
“If he is not present, it will be like applauding Putin,” he said last month. Half a success in the end, it will be Vice-President Kamala Harris who will represent the United States at the summit in Switzerland.
“Ukraine’s impatience has sometimes offended other capitals,” judges Alissa de Carbonnel, deputy director of Crisis Group’s Europe program.
The Ukrainian diplomatic offensive experienced another failure: China’s a priori refusal to participate due to the exclusion of Russia, its ally.
According to Simon Smith, a former British ambassador to Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky has also been “less successful” in convincing countries that do not feel directly affected by the Russian threat to support Kyiv more firmly.
“It’s just harder for him to persuade other countries to share his outrage at what Russia is doing, when those countries don’t feel threatened by Russia,” he tells AFP.
For William Courtney, Mr. Zelensky has become more “skillful” on the international scene, but he has “lost some of the magnetism he had in 2022,” believes Mr. Bergmann.
At the time, the Ukrainian president was roaming the parliaments of the world by videoconference as the warlord of a country which surprised with its capacity for resistance, putting to shame those who did not believe in Ukraine.
Today, “there is a kind of overexposure. Everyone has already heard the lines and the message, repeated over and over again…” notes Mr. Bergman.
The very holding of the summit in Switzerland nonetheless remains a success for Mr. Zelensky. But the question remains whether a common position of 90 countries can be outlined there.
“Countries tend to support the winner and, so far, they are not sure who it will be,” fears Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House.
