In an interview published by a Russian state channel, President Vladimir Putin said he was willing to start a dialogue with neighboring Ukraine, words that his counterpart, Volodimir Zelensky, does not believe. For kyiv, it is Moscow that does not want the talks that would put an end to more than ten months of war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that his country is ready to enter into talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, despite Moscow’s persistent attacks on Ukrainian targets.
In an interview on state television, the Russian president mentioned that Russia is “ready to negotiate some acceptable results with all participants in this process” and that it is not his country that rejects the talks, but Ukraine. An affirmation repeated by the Kremlin since the beginning of the invasion, which turned 10 months old on December 24.
For Putin, the Kremlin “has no other choice,” he said that his government was “acting in the right direction” and that it is defending national interests, the interests of citizens and the people.
Moscow insists that it will fight until it achieves all its objectives, while kyiv says that it will not rest until it has driven all Russian soldiers out of its territory. “Actually, what is fundamental here is the policy of our geopolitical adversaries, who aim to separate Russia, historical Russia,” Putin said.
The Russian president sees the war in Ukraine, which he describes as a “special military operation”, as a decisive moment in which Moscow finally faced a Western bloc that he says has been trying to destroy Russia since the collapse of the Union. Soviet in 1991.
“I think we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, of our people. And we have no choice but to protect our citizens,” Putin said.
Ukraine’s President Mykhailo Podolyak, Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser, said in a Twitter post that “Russia attacked Ukraine alone and is killing citizens” and that “Russia does not want negotiations but tries to shirk responsibility.”
Attacks on Ukraine continue
But while on the one hand President Putin talks about negotiations, this Sunday an air alert was launched twice throughout the country, and in the afternoon, according to local authorities, three missiles hit the city of Kramatorsk, in the partially occupied region of Donetsk.
The Ukrainian governor of this region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said that the missiles hit an industrial area of the city, that there were no casualties and that the city of Avdiivka was also attacked on Sunday with six rounds of shelling, in which a woman was injured.
Around the town of Bakhmut, where much of the fighting has focused in recent weeks, Russian forces are struggling to keep up the pace of their offensive, the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, reported.
This report says that “it is likely that the rate of advance of Russian forces in the Bakhmut area has slowed in recent days, although it is too early to assess whether the Russian offensive to capture the city has been completed.”
The Institute quoted Russian military bloggers, who it said have recently acknowledged “that Ukrainian forces in the Bakhmut area have managed to slightly slow down the pace of the Russian advance around the area and its surrounding settlements.”
On the other hand, according to the same report, the Ukrainian forces said that they “completely expelled the Russian forces from the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut” around December 21”, and concluded that “the Russian forces are likely to have difficulties in maintaining the pace of their offensive operations in the area and try to initiate a tactical or operational pause”.
In Kherson, the city retaken by Ukrainian forces last month, an attack by Russian troops took place this Saturday that killed and injured dozens of people.
The region’s governor, Yaroslav Yanushevich, said the Russians shelled Ukrainian-controlled areas some 71 times in the past 24 hours, including 41 attacks on the city of Kherson.
Yanushevich said a total of 16 people have been killed, including three emergency workers in the demining process in the region’s Berislav district, and another 64 people have been injured.
In the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region, according to Governor Valentyn Reznichenko, the city of Nikopol was shelled overnight with heavy artillery, but there were no reports of casualties.
On another battlefront are attacks on power plants that have left millions of people without electricity.
For Zelensky, Moscow aims to make the last days of 2022 dark and difficult. He further stated that “Russia has lost everything it could this year” and that the darkness will not stop them “leading the occupiers to new defeats. But we have to be prepared for any scenario.”
With AP and Reuters
