Ukraine Denies Possibility of Peace Talks With Russia

On Saturday, the advisor to the head of the Ukrainian president's office Mikhail Podoliak assured that his country lacks motivation to resume negotiations with Russia.

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"The current talks with Moscow will mean only one thing, that Russia has won," the official referred in an interview with the Ukrainian publication Babel.

Podoliak added that Kiev holds a dialogue with the Russian authorities exclusively to solve the problem of the exchange of prisoners, as well as the bodies of the victims.

In this regard, he added that the talks at the headquarters level are restricted only to the humanitarian component, "there are no dialogues from the military-political point of view," he assured.

Earlier, Aleksander Darchiev, head of the North American department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said that the U.S. government should convince Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to return to the negotiating table with Moscow.

The diplomat confirmed that such a decision by Washington would probably be the best way to end the conflict.

Also, in recent days, the Russian presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that his country is still willing to establish peace negotiations with Ukraine.

The negotiation process between Moscow and Kiev started on February 28, four days after the beginning of the Russian military operation on Ukrainian territory. Thereafter, several meetings took place, the first of which were held in Belarus, until March 29, when a face-to-face round was held in the Turkish city of Istanbul.

At that meeting results were obtained to start the way towards a peace agreement, but days later it was rejected by the Ukrainian side.

President Vladimir Putin declared that Kiev, by moving away from the agreements reached during the dialogue in Turkey, brought the process to an impasse.

On April 20, the Kremlin spokesman reported that Moscow sent the Zelensky government a draft agreement and would wait for a reply, which it has not received so far.