Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday (22) that he is ready to meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in Moscow for consultations on bilateral relations. Previously Zelensky had invited Putin to meet anywhere in the Donbas and had also proposed to communicate with Putin by phone. This statement of Putin is considered a response to Zelensky.
According to Interfax news agency, Putin met with Belarusian President Lukashenko on Thursday. Asked by a journalist to comment on Ukrainian President Zelensky’s proposal for a meeting between the heads of Ukraine and Russia in the Donbas, Putin said, “If we discuss the development of bilateral relations, we can. We will receive the Ukrainian president in Moscow at any time convenient for him.”
Putin believes that if he wants to discuss the problems of the Donbass, Zelensky should meet with the leaders of Luhansk (ЛНР) and Donetsk regions (ДНР), “and then discuss the problems with the representatives of the third country, which in the current situation is Russia.”
Putin also claimed that many recent actions of the current Ukrainian leadership have damaged Russian-Ukrainian relations. “This is directly related to many issues in bilateral relations. These include attitudes toward the Russian Orthodox Church and and Ukrainian citizens who speak Russian in Ukraine and Russian citizens living in Ukraine, etc.”, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is pictured delivering his state of the nation address in the Russian Duma on April 21
It is reported that Ukrainian President Zelensky (ВладимирЗеленский) invited Putin to meet him anywhere in Donbass, where the war is taking place. Earlier, Zelensky said he had requested a telephone conversation with the Russian president, but was refused. The Kremlin, in turn, claimed that it had not received any requests for talks.
Zelensky had also reportedly recorded a video specifically for sending to Putin, using the Russian language.
In the video, he said that President Putin had said that if a fight was inevitable, he would have to strike first. But when talking about not a street corner hooligan fight, but a real war with millions of lives at stake, there is no such thing as an inevitable fight.”
Zelenski added: “Unlike street fights, all parties involved in the war are losers. For it is impossible to protect anyone by attacking, or to set anyone free by occupation. Tanks cannot bring rapprochement.”
Zelensky also said that although Ukraine and Russia share a common past, they look to the future in different ways, and there is a possibility that both sides will stop the war. Now is the time to at least stop the chain of deaths that will bring troop losses in the future.
Zelensky directly pointed out that Russia is the only party in the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine that does not support the “return to a full ceasefire” in Donbas. Thus, this issue was discussed in the negotiations of the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and in the “Normandy format”, which were unsuccessful because of the Russian opposition.
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