Moscow (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow favours political and diplomatic norms to resolve the Russia-Ukraine war, but the opposing side and the West rejected that way, Russian news agencies reported on Sunday.
In a recent meeting, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a prisoner swap during their third set of direct discussions in Istanbul on Wednesday. Still, they appeared to make little improvement on ceasefire terms or a possible meeting between their presidents, with their session ending after less than an hour.
Today, Dmitry Peskov stated,
“Our preferred route is through political and diplomatic means,”
according to the Russia state news agency.
He further added, without providing proof, that Russia continues its military procedure in Ukraine because
“all proposals for dialogue were rejected, both by Ukraine and by Western countries.”
How does Russia portray Western involvement in the war?
Over time, Russia has been accusing Ukraine of carrying out attacks on its territory with US-supplied ATACMS missiles and UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles. The Russian Defence Ministry claims there have been a number of incidents since the end of 2024 where barrages of these missiles from the West have struck targets of military value in Russian territories, including Bryansk, Belgorod, Saratov, Tula, and Tatarstan.
Russian authorities assert that their air defence systems successfully intercepted all, or nearly all, of the missiles and/or drones in these attacks, and in at least a few of them, there were no injuries.
Why is a Zelenskyy-Putin summit unlikely before August?
A few days earlier, Russia stated on Friday that a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy could only occur as an absolute effort to lock a peace agreement. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov expressed that it was unlikely that such a gathering could happen by the end of August, as Ukraine has offered.
Ukraine conveys that a leaders’ session is required in order to reach a breakthrough in the slow-moving approach, which has witnessed the two sides hold three short sessions of peace conferences in Turkey since mid-May. In remarks to reporters, Zelenskyy stated Russia had started to engage over the possibility of such a session.