(Kyiv) The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, estimated Thursday that only “ill-informed” or misled people could push their country to negotiate with Russia.
“Those who say Ukraine should negotiate with Russia now are either misinformed, deceived, or they are siding with Russia and want (Vladimir) Putin to pause before even greater aggression,” he said. writes M. Kouleba on X.
“We should not fall into this trap and we will not,” he said.
According to Western media, some of Kyiv’s allies have begun to raise the question of peace talks with Russia in the face of the lack of major movements on the front for a year and concerns over the West’s ability to continue supporting the Ukraine in its war.
Kyiv held multiple rounds of negotiations with Moscow between 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and staged an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, and Russia’s invasion in February 2022, highlighted Mr. Kouleba.
“None of 200 rounds of negotiations or 20 ceasefires have stopped Putin from launching a brutal and all-out invasion of Ukraine,” he continued.
Under Franco-German mediation, Kyiv and Moscow notably concluded so-called “Minsk” peace agreements in 2014 and 2015 which reduced the intensity of hostilities in eastern Ukraine, but without stopping them.
Direct negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko, – Ukrainian president from 2014 to 2019 –, then the meeting between the Russian president and Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris in December 2019 did not bring lasting peace.
At the start of the invasion, Ukrainian and Russian officials met several times, including in Belarus and Turkey. President Zelensky ended these talks after the discovery in Boutcha, near Kyiv, of atrocities attributed to the Russian army by Ukraine and the West, which Moscow denies.
Mr. Zelensky repeated last week that his country would not negotiate with Russia as long as its troops were on its soil and Vladimir Putin remained in power.
“It is high time that everyone in Kyiv and Washington realizes that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
He assured that dialogue was “absolutely necessary” and that Moscow was “certainly ready to start it”.