Sky News reports:

[https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-latest-vladimir-putin-has-started-wwiii-zelenskyy-says-on-cusp-of-war-anniversary-12541713]

Russia shouldn't make any 'gains' at the negotiating table, Costa says

...Antonio Costa says Russia must not make any "gains" at the negotiating table."Russia must come to the negotiation table in the serious way and accept that it will not win this war," he adds.
 
More anniversary nonsense. this time from some guy called Antonio Costa whose has clearly spent too long in the sun.
 
A negotiation is all about wins and losses and no-one in their right mind bothers to negotiate if there will be no gain in negotiating - maybe this is a thing in Portugal - but most people do not go into a negotation to lose.
 
That's precisely President Zelensky's position. Costa could have said exactly the same thing about Ukraine.

But this all hardly surprising - Mr Costa is a former lawyer and the European Council President.

The EU's idea of a negotiation is to bully its member states - like Hungary and Slovakia - to get what it wants, even if that undermines the energy security of the state in question and clearly violates those much-vaunted European 'values'.

Russia came to the negotiating table in a serious way in 2022 but those negotations were undermined by the USA, UK and EU in a frivolous way and the result is a clear war crime - hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Ukrainians, instead of the peace that was in prospect 4 years ago but Ukraine was persuaded to drop. 

And all because the Ukrainian state decided it was better to impose an unelected government on their own people, reduce the rights of Russian-speaking citizens in Eastern Ukraine and then kill them for demanding autonomy from this discriminatory policy.

Shocking how senior politicians are still trotting out this nonsense.