The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, assured this Friday that he will order a 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 abandons its plans to join NATO. The annexed territories are Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
“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 senior staff.
Putin stressed that “Ukrainian troops must withdraw completely of the entire territory of the popular republics of Donetsk and Luganskand from the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye. Then negotiations will be possible.”
It is not the first time that Putin has opened a ceasefire with these same conditions, according to journalistic reports. At the end of May, the Reuters agency revealed that the Russian president was willing to stop the war in Ukraine if kyiv gave up precisely the same regions that he mentioned this Friday.
This Friday he again specified that he 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.
The Russian leader also assured that Russia is committed to guaranteeing the withdrawal “safe and unobstructed” of Ukrainian military units.
He stressed that Russia demands a “neutral, non-bloc and non-nuclear” Ukraine, to which must be added the demilitarization and denazification of the country, two of the objectives set when it 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 Sevastopoland the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as entities of the Russian Federation,” he added.
Putin stressed that all these commitments must be coined as international agreementswhich would also include “the cancellation of all sanctions against Russia.”
“I believe that Russia is proposing a variant that will make it possible to truly end the war in Ukraine. That is, we call to turn a tragic page of 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.
“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.
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