Ukraine’s president on Sunday rejected Russia’s proposal for talks in Gomel, Belarus, as the country serves as a rear base for the invasion of Ukraine, saying “any other city” outside Belarus would be fine.
“Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest, Istanbul, Baku. We have offered them all. And any other city would be fine for us as long as we don’t get rockets fired at us from its territory,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in an online video.
Addressing the Belarusians in this speech, he pointed out that “if there were no offensive actions on your territory, we could have talked to Minsk”.
Already on Friday, Russia had said it wanted to negotiate with the Ukrainians, but only in Belarus, although the invasion of northern Ukraine and the offensive on Kiev started from this country.
On Sunday, the Kremlin did it again.
A delegation of representatives of the “Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense and other services, in particular the presidential administration arrived in Belarus for negotiations with the Ukrainians”, according to the spokesman of the Russian presidency, quoted by national agencies.
In addition, when his services spoke of talks on Friday, President Vladimir Putin called on the Ukrainian army to stage a coup and called the country’s authorities a “clique of drug addicts and neo-Nazis”.