Switzerland said Monday that 90 countries and organizations will attend the two-day Ukraine peace conference it is hosting beginning Saturday.
The Swiss government said that about half of the countries are from Europe and that broad global participation is important to launching a process with broad support.
A government statement said the peace conference aims to be a platform for discussing ways to achieve a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace for Ukraine based on international law and the U.N. charter,” as well as working on a framework for carrying out a peace plan and how to involve Russia and Ukraine in a peace process.
Switzerland is hosting the conference at the request of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but Russia is not participating.
Russia has criticized the process and said it would engage in peace talks only if they take into account the situation on the ground, including Russia’s battlefield gains since launching its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Zelenskyy has demanded Russia withdraw from all Ukrainian territory.
During a state visit to France, U.S. President Joe Biden said Sunday that he and French counterpart Emmanuel Macron agreed on using profits from $280 billion in frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine’s war effort against Russian aggression.
Russia says any diversion of the profits from its frozen funds would amount to theft.
The Russian frozen funds generate $2.7 billion to $3.8 billion a year in profit, which the European Union says is not contractually owed to Russia and therefore represents a windfall.
U.S. officials expect the G7 wealthy democracies to send a tough new warning this week to smaller Chinese banks to stop assisting Russia in evading Western sanctions, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Negotiations were still ongoing about the exact format and content of the warning, according to the people, who declined to be named discussing ongoing diplomatic engagements.
