Putin announces way to bring Ukraine conflict to final completion

Accepting Russia's terms will end the conflict in Ukraine immediately, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Photo: en.kremlin.ru by Администрация президента России, CC BY 4.0

The head of state thanked SCO leaders for their proposals to resolve the conflict and assured that Moscow was ready to take their initiatives into account. Russia "has always advocated and advocates a peaceful, political and diplomatic resolution of the situation,” Putin said.

"In mid-June, we presented another option for resolving [the conflict in Ukraine], which, if the Ukrainian side, and most importantly its Western sponsors, were ready to accept it, would make it possible to immediately stop hostilities, literally immediately, save human lives and begin negotiations," Vladimir Putin said.

At a meeting with the leadership of the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14, Putin said that Moscow made another "concrete and real peace proposal” to Kyiv. According to Putin, Ukraine should withdraw troops of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) from Russia's new regions for peace negotiations to start. Ukraine must also abandon the idea of ​​joining NATO. In this case, according to Putin, Moscow will be ready to cease fire in the zone of the special military operation. The Russian leader also clarified that the Armed Forces of Ukraine must completely withdraw from the entire territory of the new regions of the Russian Federation — within their administrative boundaries that existed at the time of their entry into Ukraine.

The neutral and nuclear-free status of Ukraine is Moscow's another principled condition. As for Russia, Moscow is ready to sit down at the negotiating table "even tomorrow,” Putin said. The President noted that the talks would not be about an opportunity to freeze the conflict — the purpose of the talks is to finally complete the crisis.

Kremlin excludes Erdogan's mediation in Ukraine talks

According to Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cannot be a mediator in the negotiations. At the same time, Erdogan and Putin discussed the regulation of the conflict at their meeting at the SCO summit in Astana.