UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR Zelenskyy said he didn’t trust Russian vows to scale back military activity and that his army was getting ready for further fighting in the east.
“We don’t believe anyone, not a single beautiful phrase,” Zelenskyy said in a video address to the nation, adding that Russian troops were regrouping to strike the eastern Donbass region.
“We will not give anything away. We will fight for every metre of our territory.”
It comes as the Kremlin played down hopes of a breakthrough following peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegates in Istanbul a day earlier.
“We cannot state that there was anything too promising or any breakthroughs,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“There is a lot of work to be done,” Peskov said.
He added that Moscow considered it “positive” that Kyiv had started outlining its demands in writing.
“We carefully avoid making statements on the matters” that are discussed at the talks because “we believe that negotiations should take place in silence”, he added.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s lead negotiator said the opposite; Vladimir Medinsky described talks in Istanbul on Monday as “meaningful”, suggesting discord within the Kremlin.
A defence official at the talks said Russia would be significantly reducing its military activity near Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and the city of Chernigiv.
However, Ukrainian authorities said Russian forces had later bombarded the northern city of Chernigiv today, despite Moscow’s claims.
Medinsky said in a video he posted on Telegram today that “Ukraine expressed readiness to fulfil fundamental demands that Russia had insisted on all these past years”.
“If all these commitments are fulfilled, the threat of the creation of a NATO base of operations will be liquidated”, he said.
“Work is continuing, talks are continuing,” he added, while Russia’s position on Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2020, and the separatist regions in Donbas in eastern Ukraine “remains unchanged”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is visiting China, said Moscow was pleased with the negotiations.
In a video clip posted on Twitter by the Russian Foreign Ministry on twitter, Lavrov described as progress Ukraine’s readiness to refrain from joining NATO, “as well as understanding that the issues of Crimea and Donbass have been settled for good”.
Kyiv wants legally binding security guarantees from Western countries in order to drop its NATO aspirations.
But Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko later refuted Lavrov’s statement.
“The issues of Crimea and Donbas will be settled for good after Ukraine restores its sovereignty over them,” Nikolenko wrote on Twitter. “During the talks in Istanbul, the Ukrainian delegation presented its proposals on how to achieve this goal.”
Lavrov was in China to attend a ministerial conference of countries neighbouring Afghanistan.
Condemning Western sanctions over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine, he told his Iranian counterpart that Russia will be “arranging practical steps to allow us to go round these unlawful actions,” TASS state news agency reported.
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