MANILA, Philippines – President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will not personally attend the peace summit on Ukraine to be held in Switzerland next week, contrary to an earlier pronouncement made by his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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Malacañang said on Tuesday, June 11, that Marcos has tasked Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation and Unity Carlito Galvez Jr. to represent the Philippines at the upcoming conference.

Zelenskyy visited Manila on June 3 – his first as Ukrainian president – to personally invite Marcos to take part in the summit, and claimed that the Philippine president confirmed his attendance.

“He said that Filipinos will support the summit. I said, for us, it’s very important for him to come. He said he will come and he will participate in the summit,” Zelenskyy said in a television interview with a Filipino broadcast journalist later the same day.

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While Malacañang confirmed also that day that the Philippines will indeed take part in the summit, it took them another week to say whether or not Marcos will be flying to Switzerland for the event.

Switzerland said on Monday, June 10, that 90 states and organizations have already signed up for the peace summit on Ukraine, slated on June 15 to 16.

The gathering will lay out provisions of the Ukrainian government’s peace plan aimed at ending the full-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022, a war that already killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Zelenskyy is also hoping that the peace summit would find solutions to issues on nuclear security, food security, and detention of war prisoners, among others.

Russia, which is not invited to the summit, has called the event meaningless. China has said it won’t participate if Moscow is not invited.

Zelenskyy has accused Russia and China of trying to disrupt his peace summit. – Rappler.com