Politico reports:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is open to a neutral status for his country and a “compromise” on the contested Donbas region as part of peace negotiations with Russia, he said in an interview with several Russian outlets on Sunday.

“Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are prepared to go through with it,” Zelenskyy told Russian news organizations Meduza, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain, speaking in Russian throughout the interview.

For Ukraine, neutrality would mean dropping its long-held ambitions to join NATO, making it a buffer state between Russia and the Western military alliance. Moscow has been angry for years about the eastward expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union.

Zelenskyy attached strict conditions for these possible concessions: Russian troops would have to withdraw to pre-February 24 positions and any peace deal would be put to the Ukrainian people in a referendum, which could take up to a year to organize. The referendum is a strict condition, Zelenskyy said, arguing Ukrainian must hasve a say in any potential territorial changes that would require constitutional revisions. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports:

It was a remarkable moment in the war in Europe: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a 90-minute-long Zoom interview on Sunday to four prominent journalists from Russia, the country invading his.

Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement notified the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview.”

Journalists based outside Russia published it anyway. Those still inside Russia did not. The episode laid bare the extraordinary, and partly successful, efforts at censorship being undertaken in Russia by President Vladimir V. Putin’s government as his bloody invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, along with Mr. Zelensky’s attempts to circumvent that censorship and reach the public directly. [Continue reading…]