Briefly speaking about the conflict in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday after a meeting in Sochi with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Russia is not abandoning negotiations to end the war, News.ro reports with reference to CNN.

“I want to say that Russia has never given up on negotiations and we are not giving up now either,” Putin said at a joint press conference with the Turkish leader.

He noted that during the three-hour meeting, Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised the topic of negotiations to end the conflict.

“As you know, an agreement was reached through the mediation of the President of Turkey, draft documents were agreed upon between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations, but then Ukraine sent them… to scrap metal! No one returns to him. We are hearing about some new initiatives, but this has not been discussed with us. Therefore, we do not accept anything new. As for mediation offers, I have never refused them. We are also grateful to the President of Turkey for his efforts in this direction,” Vladimir Putin said.

In June, at a summit with African leaders who came to Moscow to discuss peace, Vladimir Putin presented them with an initialed draft of a treaty with Ukraine, which was to be prepared in Istanbul in March 2022, but which Kyiv later abandoned. , throwing it into the “garbage bin of history,” as Putin said at the time, TASS quotes. Undoubtedly, the Russian leader now referred to this document.

The first negotiations between Russia and Ukraine after the start of the Russian invasion took place in early March 2022 in Belarus, but did not yield tangible results.

As reported by TASS, on March 29, 2022, a new round of negotiations was held in Istanbul, as a result of which the head of the Russian delegation, adviser to the President of Russia, Volodymyr Medinsky, stated that for the first time, Moscow received from Kyiv the principles of a possible future agreement on paper, which would include, among other things , obligations regarding Ukraine’s neutrality and non-aligned status and its refusal to deploy foreign weapons and military, including nuclear weapons, on its territory. Russian troops were withdrawn from Kyiv precisely because of the desire to implement this agreement, Moscow claims.

But since then, negotiations on the settlement of the conflict have been completely frozen and, according to the Russian leader, Kyiv has abandoned the agreements made in Istanbul.

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