While she supported any help to end the deaths in Ukraine, Liubov Abravitova worried that Cyril Ramaphosa’s phone call with Vladimir Putin signalled a ‘new’ kind of mediation – a one-sided affair.
Ukraine’s ambassador Liubov Abravitova says President Cyril Ramaphosa has not asked her to arrange a call with her president, Volodymyr Zelensky, so that South Africa might act as a mediator of peace talks.
She was responding to Ramaphosa’s telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday. Ramaphosa tweeted afterwards that he had been asked – by an unnamed party – to mediate, and seemed to be prepared to accept the role.
Abravitova publicly called on South Africa recently to mediate in the conflict, but she told Daily Maverick on Friday that she didn’t think Ramaphosa could have been referring to her.
“I was calling to South Africa to mediate, to call on Russia to provide ceasefire, to call to withdraw its troops from the territory of Ukraine,” she said.
“I was not approached to organise a telephone call with my president, not on presidential level. Maybe this is the new form of mediation – only with one, aggressive side, which is committing the massive crimes of war…