BERLIN, August 24. /TASS/. Patience is needed to achieve peace in Ukraine and it will be a rather challenging task, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said.
"Nobody should say today that we are discussing only supplies of weapons," Merz said at the party congress of the Christian Democratic Union in Lower Saxony. Potential peace in Ukraine needs patience, he noted. At the same time, everyone should understand how difficult this task will be during weeks or even months, he noted.
"We made the first steps," the chancellor said. "Nevertheless, let me make an analogy: we are at a ten-kilometer segment and probably passed the first two hundred meters," Merz added.
On August 15, a meeting between Russian and US Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump took place at a military base in Alaska. In a statement to the press following the talks, Putin said that the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict was the main topic of the summit. The Russian leader also called for turning the page in bilateral relations and resuming cooperation, and invited Trump to Moscow. For his part, the US president announced the progress made in the talks, but noted that the parties had not managed to reach an agreement.