Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the President of Ukraine, said on Monday that any peace agreement acceptable to Ukraine should include not only the restoration of Ukraine’s sovereign borders, but also the creation of a 100-120-kilometer demilitarized zone inside Russia, along the border with Ukraine, reports. News.ro.

Mykhailo Podolyak (second from right below) was Ukraine’s chief negotiator at the peace talks with Russia.Photo: Serhii Kholodylin / AFP / Profimedia Images

The zone is necessary to protect Ukrainian regions from bombings, Podolyak justified in a post on Twitter.

“The key subject of the post-war agreement should be the establishment of guarantees to prevent the recurrence of aggression in the future. To ensure the real safety of the residents of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhya, Luhansk and Donetsk regions and to protect them from bombings, it will be necessary to introduce a 100-120 km demilitarized zone on the territory of Belgorod and Bryansk. , Kursk and Rostov republics,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote.

The presidential adviser also suggests that the demilitarized zone should initially have an international presence to oversee it.

“Probably, at the initial stage, with a mandatory international control contingent,” he noted at the end of the message.

New ironies of Ukraine before the Russian invaders

The reference to the four Russian regions as “republics” appears to be a response to Moscow’s support for separatist Ukrainian entities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which call themselves “people’s republics” and border Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin used these so-called republics as a pretext for invading Ukraine last year and annexed them in September, along with the occupied territories of Zaporizhia and Kherson regions.

On the other hand, the four regions of Russia mentioned by Podolyak have recently seen an increase in drone attacks that Moscow attributes to Kyiv, including incursions by Russian nationalists from the territory of Ukraine.

Podolyak made the comments about the need for a “demilitarized zone” in Russia after a video went viral on social media earlier Monday in which Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov suggested that the easiest solution to cross-border shelling from Ukraine was the neighboring Ukrainian region of Kharkiv. annexed by Russia.

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