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June 17 () –
African leaders displaced this Saturday to St. Petersburg have presented a ten-point peace plan to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and have urged him to open negotiations with Ukraine to end the armed conflict.
“We would like to encourage him to start negotiations with Ucarnia,” said the president of Comoros, Azali Assoumani, who is acting president of the African Union, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.
The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was also present: “We are convinced that the time has come for the two parties to start negotiations and put an end to this war,” he said.
In the delegation there are also representatives from Egypt, Senegal, Zambia, Congo and Uganda who have delivered a ten-point document to try to promote peace.
Putin, for his part, has once again blamed Ukraine for the conflict and for the lack of contacts to achieve peace. In addition, he has shown the African leaders a draft peace agreement that they negotiated in Istanbul in the contacts of the first weeks after the invasion that provided for the neutrality of Ukraine.
The Russian president explained that after the Russian withdrawal from the kyiv and Chernigov regions, the Ukrainian government was no longer interested in the text and “threw it into the dustbin of history.”
Negotiations began shortly after February 24, the date of the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, first mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and from March 29 face-to-face in Istanbul, Turkey.
In May it was first Moscow and then kyiv that announced the suspension of the negotiations. Since then, Ukraine has demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from all Ukrainian territory as a condition for dialogue.
Russia for its part calls for the neutrality of Ukraine, the resignation from NATO and the EU and the recognition of Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson as territory of the Russian Federation.
