The Russian president, Vladimir Putinassured this Friday that he will order an immediate ceasefire as soon as Ukraine withdraws its troops from the four regions annexed by Moscow in the east and south of the country, and renounces its plans to join NATO.
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“As soon as kyiv announces that it is ready for this decision and begins an actual withdrawal of troops from those regions and also officially communicates its renunciation of plans to join NATO, the order to cease fire will be immediately issued from us. and start negotiations,” Putin said when addressing the Foreign Ministry’s senior staff, an intervention broadcast live on television.
As soon as kyiv announces that it is ready for this decision (…) the order to cease fire and begin negotiations will be immediately issued from our side.
Putin stressed that “Ukrainian troops must completely withdraw from the entire territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics, and from the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Then negotiations will be possible”.
He specified that it refers to the administrative territory of those four regions when Ukraine achieved independence from the USSR in 1991, since today the Russian Army does not control them in their entirety.
Ukrainian rescuers work at the site of the bombing of a residential area in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
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The Russian leader also assured that Russia is committed to guaranteeing the “safe and unhindered” withdrawal of Ukrainian military units.
He stressed that Russia demands a “neutral, non-bloc and non-nuclear” Ukraineto which must be added the demilitarization and denazification of the country, two of the objectives set when he ordered the start of the military campaign in February 2022.
“Without a doubt, the rights, freedoms and interests of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine must be fully guaranteed; the new territorial reality must be recognized; the status of Crimea and Sevastopol, and the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and the Kherson regions and Zaporizhzhia as entities of the Russian Federation,” he added.
Putin stressed that all these commitments must be coined as international agreements, which would also include “the cancellation of all sanctions against Russia.”
“I consider that Russia is proposing a variant that will make it possible to truly end the war in Ukraine. That is, we call for turning a tragic page in history,” he said.
At the same time, Putin warned that “If kyiv and Western capitals give up on this, as in the past, they will ultimately be politically and morally responsible for the continued bloodshed”.
“Evidently, the situation on the ground, on the battle front, will change and not in favor of the kyiv regime and the conditions for the start of negotiations will be different,” he stressed.
Putin, who once again denounced that the Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky is an “illegitimate” president who is usurping power after his mandate expired on May 20, set these conditions on the eve of the Swiss peace summit.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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“We can already anticipate that (in Switzerland) everything will be reduced to vague conversations of a demagogic nature and a new round of accusations against Russia,” he asserted.
Ukraine’s harsh response: ‘a complete farce’
An advisor to the Ukrainian presidency reacted to the Russian president’s statements this Friday and said that Putin’s claims are “offensive to common sense.”
“Everything is a complete farce. Therefore – once again – forget your illusions and stop taking seriously the ‘Russian proposals’ that are offensive to common sense,” MijaÃlo Podoliak wrote on social networks.
A new system of collective and indivisible security in Eurasia
Putin also proposed this Friday the creation of a new system of collective security guarantees in Eurasia in the face of the failure of the Euro-Atlantic model.
“We are witnesses of the failure of Euro-Atlantic security. In fact, we must create it again, form a new security system in Eurasia,” he stated during a speech before the senior staff of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The Russian president indicated that “the international community had a unique opportunity to build a reliable and fair security system”.
“This did not require much: it only required the simple ability to listen to all interested parties and the mutual willingness to take them into account. We repeatedly warned about the wrong course that the West had chosen,” he said.
For this reason, he considered that “the time has come to begin a broad debate on a new system of bilateral and multilateral guarantees of collective security in Eurasia.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum.
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“Along with this, in the future we must aspire to a gradual withdrawal of the military presence of foreign powers from the Eurasian region,” he said, referring to the United States.
Putin asked his diplomats “considerably activate dialogue between multilateral organizations already active in Eurasia.”
“These are primarily the State Union (of Russia and Belarus), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (CSO),” he listed, Provide for the inclusion of other organizations from Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
Furthermore, he expressed his interest that The UN joins this dialogue, particularly regarding the “fundamental and vitally important issue for all, the creation of an indivisible security system.”
Beyond the military aspect of security, he indicated that the new system must address issues of “economy, social well-being, integration and mutually beneficial cooperation, the solution of problems such as the eradication of poverty, inequality, climate, ecology, the reaction mechanisms to pandemics and global economic crises”.
“Everything is important,” he said.
Summing up, Putin noted that This is a system that will allow all states to be sure of their own security.
“Then we will be able to undertake in another, truly constructive way, the solution to the multiple conflicts that exist today,” he concluded.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
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Along with this, in the future we must aim for a gradual withdrawal of the military presence of foreign powers from the Eurasian region.
For his part, the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, pointed out that the proposal made today by Putin “naturally also presupposes an open door to Europe.”
“If this great Eurasian association focuses on the creation of economic, transportation, and financial chains, independent of the dictates of the United States and its satellites, then it will lay the social and economic, material foundations for the security system that we want to form, open to all countries without exception,” he said.
In December 2021, Russia accused the West of guaranteeing its security at the expense of other countries and demanded the withdrawal of NATO from Eastern Europe, the refusal to include Ukraine and Georgia in the Atlantic Alliance and start negotiations to create a security system. indivisible.
The West’s refusal to agree to these terms, which it described as Russia’s ultimatum, was used by Moscow to start the war in Ukraine.
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