Russia admits that its attacks on civilian infrastructure are intended to get Ukraine to sit down to negotiate

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that missile fire and shelling on Ukrainian territory is aimed at facilities of an exclusively military nature. However, the massive attacks in recent weeks -the one on Tuesday, which was the largest recorded since the beginning of the war, on February 24; and the one unleashed this Thursday – have hit civil infrastructures, mainly energy, which have left tens of thousands of Ukrainians without electricity, water and heating.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, has acknowledged that “the lack of electricity and heating in many regions of Ukraine are a consequence of the actions of the kyiv authorities, which refuse to negotiate”, to actually capitulate if they are taken into account the demands that Moscow has been putting on the table up to now.

The presidential spokesman stated in his usual daily appearance before the press that the bombardments “are carried out on those infrastructure facilities that are directly or indirectly related to the military potential of Ukraine and the Ukrainian regime.” “The Ukrainian side lacks the will to resolve the problem, to enter into negotiations, in addition to the already shown attitude of abandoning the understandings already agreed in the text, something that must also be discussed,” Peskov said Thursday in reference to the breakdown of contacts after the definitive failure of the negotiations on March 29 in Istanbul. Then, the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinski, made it clear that Moscow will never give up Crimea and Donbas, thus giving up any possibility of an agreement. Now the situation is worse, since Russia has annexed, in addition to Donetsk and Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia.

In his teleconference address to the participants in the G-20 summit in Bali, President Volodimir Zelensky presented Ukraine’s proposals for peace with Russia, which include 10 points; the main one, the withdrawal of Russian troops from all occupied territories in Ukraine, including Crimea. But he also called for radiological and nuclear safety, food and energy security, the release of all prisoners, restoration of the country’s territorial integrity, cessation of hostilities and war reparations.

“Unrealistic” conditions

Russia’s response came on Tuesday with the most massive missile barrage since the start of the invasion and on Thursday the attacks continued. The Russian Foreign Ministry considered kyiv’s preconditions for resuming peace talks “unacceptable” while the head of the ministry, Sergei Lavrov, described Zelensky’s conditions as “unrealistic.” Peskov assured that day that Zelenski’s statement “means that he really does not want to or cannot negotiate anything”, implying that he is tied hand and foot by Washington. “So the Russian Federation will achieve its objectives by continuing the special military operation”, the euphemism with which the Russian authorities refer to the current war in Ukraine.

Zelenski suggested that, if there are negotiations, they be carried out publicly and the spokesman for the Russian Presidency has assured that something like this today is “unimaginable”. Peskov once again called on Washington to “push kyiv towards diplomacy.” “If the United States were able to take Russia’s concerns into account, it could encourage kyiv to come back to the negotiating table if it wanted to,” he noted. Moreover, according to Peskov, “if the United States and NATO had put pressure on the kyiv regime in their day and had given guarantees that they would not carry out a new civil war and an attack against their own population in two already independent republics, then there would have been no special operation.”

“Washington says that if there were no Russian bombing, the crash of an S-300 of the Ukrainian air defense in Poland would not have taken place. But if you apply this logic, then we would have to look at the situation in another direction and we would have to conclude that if there had not been a complete unwillingness on the part of the United States and the Alliance to address Russia’s concerns, it would not have been carried out. carry out a special military operation in Ukraine,” Peskov stressed.