President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that he arrived in Saudi Arabia this Friday to attend the Arab League summit, and then went to Japan for the G7 meeting.
“I arrived in Saudi Arabia. I will speak at the Arab League summit. I will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud and hold other bilateral negotiations,” Zelensky wrote on the Telegram social network.
This Friday, the coastal city of Jeddah will host the 32nd Arab League Summit.
This is Zelenskiy’s first visit to the region since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of crude oil, has recently strengthened ties with China and is coordinating oil policy with Russia in the midst of Moscow’s war against Ukraine, according to French news agency AFP.
In a message he posted on Telegram, Zelenskiy said one of Kyiv’s priorities is “protecting Ukraine’s Muslim community.”
“The leader of the Crimean Tatar people, Mustafa Dzhemilev, is with us. Crimea was the first to suffer from the Russian occupation, and the majority of those repressed in the occupied Crimea are Muslims,” he wrote.
Zelensky said he would present the Ukrainian peace plan to the League of Arab States, in the adoption of which “as many states as possible should be involved.”
Zelensky’s peace plan provides for the withdrawal of Russian troops from all over Ukraine, including Crimea occupied since 2014, as well as Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, annexed by Moscow in September 2022.
Russia rejects these demands, arguing that Kyiv must come to terms with the new reality.
Zelensky also said he intends to guarantee “energy security in the coming winter” in Jeddah.
He also said that his priorities are the return of “all political prisoners from Crimea and territories temporarily occupied” by Russian troops, as well as all persons “illegally deported.”
The League of Arab States includes 22 countries: Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Syria. , Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia.
After Saudi Arabia, Zelensky is due to attend the G7 summit in Japan’s Hiroshima, where leaders of major Western economies have already announced new sanctions against the Russian economy.
The Ukrainian leader has just completed a tour of several European countries to obtain more weapons and military hardware to support a major counter-offensive to retake Russian-occupied territory.