2023-11-09 13:43:38
Given the course of the war, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has rejected all calls for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. “Those who claim that Ukraine should now negotiate with Russia are either poorly informed or misled,” Kuleba said on Thursday on the online network X (Twitter).
Ukraine cannot and will not “fall into this trap,” he added. With his statement, the Ukrainian foreign minister responded to reports in Western media that some of Kiev’s allies were increasingly raising the question of peace talks with Russia in view of the stalemate on the front.
More than 22 months following the start of Russia’s war of aggression, the more than a thousand-kilometer-long front line between the two warring sides has barely moved for almost a year, although Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in June to retake Russian-occupied territories.
According to Kuleba, Kiev held hundreds of talks with Moscow between 2014 and the start of Russia’s war of aggression. None of these negotiations stopped Russian President Vladimir Putin from “launching a brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022,” he emphasized.
In 2014, Russian-backed separatists violently took control of parts of eastern Ukraine, and Moscow also annexed the Crimean peninsula. Germany and France subsequently brokered several talks that led to a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, but did not bring lasting peace.
Zelensky said on US television last week that Ukraine would not be willing to talk to Russia until Russian troops withdrew from his country.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that it was “high time for everyone in Kiev and Washington to realize that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.” A dialogue is “urgently needed” and Moscow is “certainly ready to start it,” he said.
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