The Kremlin sees a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, which was reached shortly after the start of the war but ultimately failed, as a possible basis for a new solution – and is making additional demands.
The agreement negotiated in Istanbul at the time could serve as a basis for new negotiations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced on Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.
“New territories are now enshrined in our constitution, which was not the case two years ago,” he said at the same time. The reason for the statements is the Swiss proposal for a peace conference, which is mainly intended to mobilize more international support for Ukraine. The talks with Moscow will only take place in a second step.
Agreement is effective from March 2022
At the end of March 2022, about a month after the attack on Ukraine on Putin’s orders, when it became clear that Moscow’s planned capture of Kiev would fail, negotiators from Ukraine and Russia agreed on a provisional agreement to end hostilities during talks in Istanbul to discontinue. end. It was later announced that Ukraine agreed not to join NATO and to remain neutral.
However, the agreement was not implemented, partly because disagreements persisted over territorial claims. Russia started the war on the pretext of “liberating” the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, some of which were controlled by pro-Russian separatists, from Kiev’s rule. In the meantime, Russia has declared these two regions, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, their own national territory in the constitution, although the country only partially controls these military forces.
Another reason for the failure is that the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers against Ukrainian civilians in Kiev suburbs such as Bucha at the time became known. This made it impossible for Ukraine to reach an agreement.
Zelensky calls on Russian troops to withdraw
The demands that Moscow has officially expressed so far include, in addition to territorial claims, the abandonment of a powerful army and an unspecified “denazification” of Ukraine. This can best be understood as the establishment of a Moscow-friendly government in Kiev. All this is seen in Ukraine as a call for surrender. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in turn demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.
Peskov declined to go into detail about Moscow’s territorial claims. It is still too early for details on purely ‘theoretical negotiations’. There are still no signs that Ukraine is ready to talk, he complained. Propagandistic political talk shows on Russian television repeatedly talk about the capture of the cities of Kharkiv and Odessa or even the complete destruction of Ukraine.
Source: Krone
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