“This year it has to be the one that Ukraine conquered peace, a fair peace and that respects his freedom, his sovereignty and the United Nations Charter.” José Manuel Albares, Spanish Foreign Minister, has seconded on Tuesday since Ukraine the widespread expectation among the Western Chancellors that the war has numbers to end in 2025. This is what Volodimir Zelenski, head of Ukrainian state, wishes, and he wants it above all US President Donald Trump. Albares has assured its counterpart Ukraine, Andrii Sibiga, that the government will do everything possible to “a fair peace agreement.” The Spanish Foreign head has admitted that the main question is what the Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to decide, and has considered “absurd” to speak for now the possibility of sending European peace troops to Ukraine.
Albares has made his third visit to Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, the first since 2023, when he was in kyiv on the occasion of a European Union summit. Government representatives have lavished little on visits to the invaded country, compared to other EU key countries. It is the fifteenth country that has contributed more helps kyiv, according to the Kiel Global Economy Institute, and is the fourth EU country with more Ukrainian refugees, according to statistics from the European Commission. The Kiel Institute, which elaborates the most complete analysis of international contribution to Ukraine, estimated last December that Spain has transferred assistance of all kinds – military, humanitarian and financial – valued at 1,461 million euros. In proportion to GDP, Spain falls to position number 28 of a total of 41 states that analyzes this body.
Albares has also transferred to Lvvv to inaugurate the First Center for Cultural Activities of UNESCO in Ukraine, financed with 1.7 million euros by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation. The headquarters is located in a modernist building built in 1912, in the last years of Lviv as a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“I have transferred to the Ukraine Foreign Minister that this war cannot end an unfair peace, Spain will do your best to end a fair peace,” said Albares after his meeting with Sibiga. The head of the Ukraine diplomacy said this January in the newspaper Pravda That the only way to achieve this “fair peace” is with the full incorporation of Ukraine in NATO. The Ukrainian media mention Spain as one of the European countries that align behind Germany as contrary to the adhesion of Ukraine in NATO, due to the risk to raise tension with Russia.
Albares has indicated that the government’s position is agreed in the last summits of the Atlantic Alliance, which Ukraine must be a NATO member, but not in a short period, as kyiv would like, because it could imply an armed conflict on a larger scale: “The Ukraine Camino [hacia la OTAN] It is there, but you have to understand the critical moment in which Ukraine is, at war with Russia. ”
Asked if a conflict partially closed with a high fire or armistice would mean that Ukraine also was outside NATO, Albares has replied that “they are hypothesis that neither arises because there is still a war-war war.” Another issue that the Foreign head has indicated that it is “absurd to talk about it now” is from the debate open by several EU countries, with France at the head, to send European peace forces to Ukraine to guarantee the fulfillment of future Peace agreements: “Putin does not want peace. He only talks about war, winning and going to the end. It is absurd to speak of peace forces now. ”
Albares will meet on Wednesday in Warsaw with his Polish counterpart. Poland Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, He assured last week that if Europe has to send a peace force to Ukraine, responsibility should fall in geographically remote countries of Russia. Kosiniak-Kamysz pointed directly on January 25 at the Bloomberg agency to Spain to Italy as countries that are an example of what he considers “a lack of investment in security and defense” of NATO.
