Russia has long sought a peaceful solution and “never turned down talks” with Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin said this today in St. Petersburg as he received the peace delegation of seven African leaders and envoys, led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who met Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky yesterday in Kiev.
Indeed, the delegation urged the Kremlin leader to start peace talks with Ukraine. “We would like to encourage negotiations with Ukraine to begin,” the president of the Comoros, Azali Assoumani, current head of the African Union, told Putin, according to Interfax reports. “We are convinced that the time has come for both sides to start negotiations and end this war“said South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Putin for his part reiterated that it was Ukraine that started the war in 2014, repeating the Kremlin’s argument that the popular Euromaidan protests were a Western-financed “coup”. According to the Tass agency, Putin accused “the Kiev regime” of wanting to resolve the Donbass issue “with weapons” and of having “unleashed this war in 2014”. Russia, argued the Kremlin leader, “had every right to offer help (to the pro-Russian people of Donbass) on the basis of article 51 of the UN Charter, invoking the self-defense clause”.
As for the food crisisaccording to Putin was caused by the West, not since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “The crisis on world food markets is in no way a consequence of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, because it took shape long before the situation in Ukraine,” Putin said, accusing the West of “economically unjustified” measures related to covid-19 pandemic. “We don’t believe that shipments of Ukrainian grain to world markets can solve the problems of poverty and hunger. That’s not true,” Putin said, quoted by Tass.
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