Any international peace summit on Ukraine that would exclude Russia is simply “absurd” and will fail, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Tuesday.
Dmitri Peskov also declared for the “Argumenty I Fakty” publication that Russia continues its two-year war against Ukraine to protect itself from the West.
“Can the Ukrainian problem be solved without the participation of Russia? The answer is clear – it can’t be,” Peskov said in the interview last Thursday, the day before the armed attack at the concert hall outside Moscow.
“Because Ukraine has been transformed into a tool in the hands of the collective West, with the help of which they intend, so it seems to them, to put more pressure on Russia, to restrict Russia and abandon it on the margins of development. And, if they succeed, to finish it”, Peskov added, according to Reuters, taken over by News.ro.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called for an international peace summit, and earlier this year Switzerland said it would host the meeting and that the date and details are being discussed.
Vladimir Putin has already denounced as unenforceable the Ukrainian peace plan that calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops and the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea unilaterally annexed by Russia in 2014.
Peskov reiterated that this plan is unthinkable and also denounced plans discussed by the European Union and other countries to take control of the profits from Russian assets and give them to Ukraine.
“I think the Europeans understand that we will contest such a decision. This matter may not be about a single year, but rather decades,” he said.
Publisher: BP
