MADRID, 14 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dimitro Kuleba, said on Monday that accepting Russia’s “ultimatum” will not bring any peace, on the contrary, it will serve, he warned, to regain strength and “launch an even more brutal attack as soon as I can”.
In an extraordinary meeting of the foreign ministers of the European Union in which he participated by videoconference, Kuleba has stopped speculation about a possible negotiation with Russia stating that, although “no other country in the world longs for peace as much” as Ukraine , they will not accept Moscow’s “ultimatums”.
“We have not heard and will not hear any constructive proposals from Russia, let’s be real. Russia’s signals that it is supposedly open to negotiation is nothing more than a smokescreen for continued aggression,” he said.
In this sense, the head of Ukrainian diplomacy has asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin “does not want any compromise now” and has conditioned any attempt at negotiation to the withdrawal of Russian troops from the internationally recognized territories of Ukraine.
“This will pave the way for the peace process,” stressed Kuleba, who has asked his European partners to avoid “normalizing Russian aggression, including not allowing the Kremlin’s presence on European platforms.
“He is our colleague, but he is a war criminal and an accomplice in the crime against Ukraine,” Kuleba said of his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. “This is a person who decided to violate all norms of international law and resolutely and zealously defends these violations throughout the world,” he stressed.
Kuleba has criticized the position adopted by some countries of considering Russia a state “as friendly” as Ukraine and has stressed that “support for the Ukrainians and tolerance for Russian criminals are incompatible.”
