Moscow refuses to give ground. Invited to 10 p.m. Max this Wednesday, the spokesman for the Russian Embassy in France said that a return to the Ukrainian borders as they existed before February 24, the day the Russian invasion began, was “impossible.”
“Let’s try to think logically,” Alexander Makogonov said on BFMTV. “It is impossible” to return to such a territorial division.
The diplomat says he wants to avoid the “purges” of the “Russian” populations that “already have Russian passports and are considered by the Kiev regime as collaborators” in the territories conquered by Russia since the beginning of the war. He believes that a peace negotiated on this basis is not possible.
“How can we start talking about peace (when) if we withdraw our troops from these territories, the next day the purges and massacres begin?” he said on our set. Russia had already denounced a “genocide” of the populations of Donbass by the Ukrainian army, which was part of the official justifications for the Russian invasion.
Statement by Anthony Blinken in this regard
The proposals of Alexander Makogonov are a response addressed, among others, to the American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken who explained that the American objective remains the Russian back in Ukraine de façon à ce Kiev regagnes the lost territories after the début of war.
“The United States is committed to militarily supporting Ukraine and helping it to recover the territories that Russia has occupied since February 24,” he said at an event organized by the Wall Street Journal.
“The number one principle is that in Ukraine nothing should be done without Ukraine” and that implies that “it is the Ukrainians who decide where they want to go”, he added.
The Crimean question
Also on Wednesday, in an Instagram post thanking Ukrainian forces on the occasion of Armies Day, Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Instagram that he thought the next time he would see these soldiers would be “in a Ukrainian Donetsk and Luhansk “. “In Crimea too,” he added, vindicating once again his desire to return to Ukrainian borders before the 2014 Russian conquests.
The Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014 and two self-proclaimed republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, in Donbass, declared themselves independent (from both Ukraine and Russia), although led by pro-Russian authorities. These territories were finally officially annexed on September 30, 2022 by Russia after puppet referendums.
Source: BFM TV
