Putin calls for Ukrainian troop withdrawal for peace
Published: Friday, Jun 14th 2024, 14:00
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Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling for the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the territories annexed by Russia as a prerequisite for a possible peace solution.
If Ukraine also renounced its membership of NATO, Russia would be immediately prepared to cease fire and negotiate. Putin said this on Friday in Moscow during an appearance at the Russian Foreign Ministry. His speech was visibly aimed at the current G7 summit in Italy and the peace conference on Ukraine in Switzerland this weekend.
The affiliation of the Ukrainian administrative regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson to Russia is no longer in question, Putin said. Ukraine should withdraw its army from the parts of these regions that it still controls. The Kremlin leader spoke of Russia's minimum demands in order not to freeze the conflict, but to resolve it once and for all.
At the same time, he repeated all the demands he had already made at the beginning of the war of aggression he ordered in February 2022. It was about a neutral, non-aligned and nuclear-free Ukraine, Putin said. Ukraine should also disarm. It must be "denazified" - by which Russia means a leadership in Kiev that it likes. Russia currently occupies around a fifth of Ukraine's territory, including the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has so far insisted on the complete reconquest of its occupied territory. In addition, President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling for the prosecution of Russian war crimes and Russian reparations for the destruction caused.
The conference in Switzerland was only intended to distract attention from the real causes of the conflict, namely the policies of the West, said Putin. "The West is ignoring our interests." In front of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other top Russian diplomats, Putin twice explained at length how he believed the conflict had arisen, starting with the pro-European Maidan protests in Kiev in 2013.
The conference at the Swiss conference hotel Bürgenstock near Lucerne on Saturday and Sunday is primarily intended to mobilize international support for Ukraine - including from countries that are friendly to Russia. Russia's participation in the talks process is only planned as a second step. Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz is traveling to Switzerland on behalf of Germany, and Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling on behalf of the USA.
©Keystone/SDA
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