In a briefing to the leadership of Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday, June 14, President Vladimir Putin again voiced his version of history and made another “offer” of peace with even worse conditions than ever before.
The Financial Times reported comments by Oleksandr Lytvynenko, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who said that Putin’s comments were made to undermine the Global Peace Summit due to start on Saturday in Switzerland and another “demonstration that he doesn’t want to negotiate.”
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Speaking on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that any offer of a ceasefire by Putin could not be trusted and warned that Russia would not stop its offensive, even if his demands were met.
The UK news site was following up on reports of the meeting made in the Russian state news agency TASS, which failed to disguise the actual irony of Putin’s comments.
He first said that the 2022 invasion was an unavoidable response to Kyiv’s aggression against the citizens of a part of Ukraine that “declared their independence in accordance with international law.”
He went on: “In 2014, the residents of Donbas did not put up with it [rule from Kyiv]. Militia units rose, fought back the aggressors, and then pushed them back from Donetsk and Luhansk.”
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According to him, all those [Western nations] who helped the Kyiv regime’s war machine in recent years are accomplices of the aggressors.
He said Russia was ready to negotiate with representatives of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, which, he claimed, was the “only legitimate” government body in the country – implying that he was not prepared to negotiate with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Putin then went on to list the conditions under which he was prepared to begin negotiations with Ukraine to end the war, which he said was “another real peace proposal” to “really end the war” and gradually, “step by step,” begin to restore “good neighborly relations” with Ukraine.
Using the phrase he and his acolytes have used over the past few months said that Ukraine and the international communities must “recognize the new territorial realities,” and that any agreement “must be set through fundamental international agreements. Naturally, this involves the cancellation of all Western sanctions against Russia.”
Under Putin’s conditions, Russia would be granted full control of “Novorossiya,” the name from the times of Catherine II referring to the regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia conquered by Russia.
He said there could be no territorial compromise with Kyiv and now wants Ukraine to cede all territory in the four regions “within the administrative borders that existed at the time of their entry into Ukraine,” and that any discussion on the subject was “closed forever.”
His next condition was that Ukraine was to agree to become a neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear state and must demilitarize and accept “denazification” within the framework of the aborted 2022 Istanbul agreements. He said that “of course, the rights, freedoms and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully ensured.”
He finished by saying that if Kyiv and Western governments refused his conditions, then they would bear “political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.”
Needless to say, and probably as Putin intended, Kyiv dismissed his proposal out of hand.
Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the office of Ukraine’s president wrote on X/Twitter: “There is no novelty in this, no real peace proposals and no desire to end the war. But there is a desire not to pay for this war and to continue it in new formats. It’s all a complete sham. Therefore – once again – get rid of illusions and stop taking seriously the ‘proposals of Russia’ that are offensive to common sense....
“Its content is quite specific, extremely offensive to international law and speaks absolutely eloquently about the inability of the current Russian leadership to adequately assess the realities.”
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