The mutual exhaustion of forces on and behind the fronts and the approaching autumn mud could have more of an impact on the progress of the war than the Ukrainian-Turkish summit with UN participation, which began in Lviv on Thursday afternoon.
“Russia will not win this war,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday while visiting a military hospital in Lviv. He awarded wounded soldiers medals, called them “heroes” and thanked the armed forces “for protecting the Ukrainian country”.
The hospital visit took place shortly before a meeting between Zelensky and the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoganand AND-Secretary General Antonio Guterres held in Lviv. In the historically important 700,000-inhabitant city not far from the border with Poland, once the capital of the Austrian crown lands of Galicia and Lodomeria until 1918, the talks were about the progress of grain deliveries from the Ukraine across the Black Sea, the explosive situation in and around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant – and above all the attempt to find a diplomatic solution between Kyiv and Moscow in order to stop the war, at least for the time being, which Zelensky believes Russia cannot win. The Ukraine, however, probably not either – at least not in the way it sounds from there, namely in the sense of a reconquest of all areas lost to Russia or pro-Russian separatists since 2014, including Crimea.