Ukraine’s president this Thursday reaffirmed his refusal to negotiate an end to the war with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, with Moscow responding that Volodymyr Zelensky had long since ceased to be a Russian interlocutor.
For Zelensky, the talks are “only possible if Russia withdraws its soldiers [da Ucrânia]admit their mistake and appoint a new government”, as he said in an interview with British television channel Sky News, released this Thursday.
“Only then would it be possible” to negotiate an end to the war that began with the Russian invasion on February 24 last year, Zelensky said.
#KayBurley sat with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv for an exclusive Sky News interview.
Tanks, peace talks, Putin and Boris Johnson – here are the key points ⬇️ https://t.co/sUerXzh8Na
— Sky News (@SkyNews) January 26, 2023
“For me, [Putin] it is not interesting, neither to meet nor to talk,” he said, quoted by the Spanish agency Europa Press.
Asked about these statements, Kremlin (Russian Presidency) spokesman Dmitri Peskov noted that Zelensky does not count for Moscow.
“He has long since ceased to be a possible interlocutor for Putin,” Peskov told the Spanish news agency EFE.
Peskov accused Zelensky of coming to the Ukrainian presidency with promises he failed to keep. said.
Peskov was referring to the agreements on the separatist war in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, encompassing the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which began after the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014.
After the conflict in Donbass, a first agreement was signed in Minsk between Kiev and pro-Russian separatists, who had a second document in 2015, under French and German mediation and under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
Among other things, Ukraine claims that the 2015 document was signed under pressure from encircled Ukrainian troops and sees the agreement as the loss of sovereignty in Donbass.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin recognized the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk and claimed that the “special military operation” was the result of a request for help from separatist leaders.
At the end of September 2022, Putin issued the annexation of the two regions of Donbass, joining Kherson and Zaporijia, despite the fact that Russian forces no longer controlled part of those areas after a Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Ukraine “is only a first step for Putin,” warns Zelensky
In the Sky News interview Zelensky believed that Putin never wanted to talk about the end of the war and that this was always his position “even before the invasion”. “That’s what Putin has decided,” he said.
Zelensky repeated his warning to European allies that Ukraine is “only a first step for Putin”.
“Before the war, there were meetings. I saw a man [Putin] who said he was going to do one thing and did the other. He’s nobody to me at the moment,” he told Sky News.
He also accused Russia of sending soldiers to war who serve only as “cannon fodder”.
“They don’t care about the casualties. (…) It’s an extraordinary number. (…) From what we’ve seen and counted, there are thousands dead on their side and they keep sending them,” he added.
The number of civilian and military casualties from the war in Ukraine is unknown, but several sources, including the UN, have admitted it will be high.
Source: DN
