MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin says he does not reject the idea of peace dialogue on Ukraine. He expressed these remarks after meeting African leaders in St Petersburg. The Russian leader said an African and Chinese step could serve as a basis for discovering peace.
Russian President Putin said it was hard to execute a truce when the Ukrainian military was on the offensive.
Ukraine Conflict: Putin Says Moscow Does Not Reject Peace Dialogue
Kyiv and Moscow had said that they will not come to the talks without several preconditions. Kyiv wants its borders as they were in 1991 to be restored, something Moscow is opposed to.
Russia says instead that for talks to start, Ukraine would have to accept its country’s “new territorial truth.”
President Putin told the late-night news conference that there were no plans to increase actions on Ukraine’s front for now. Putin defended Moscow’s arrest of critical voices, saying some elements were harming the country from the inside.
President Putin said that Russia conducted some “preventive attacks” after an explosion on a Crimean bridge earlier.
After the bridge explosion, Putin promised to reply to what he said was a “terrorist” action by Kyiv. Ukraine did not formally say it was responsible for the explosion on the bridge, which connects the peninsula to Russia.
Earlier, the Russian Defence Ministry said that three Ukrainian drones were put down over Moscow Sunday, a strike that also briefly shut Moscow airport.
Media reported that one of the drones was downed on Moscow’s outskirts, and two others were “blocked by electronic warfare” and smashed into an office compound.
Moscow and its vicinities, lying about 500 km from the Ukrainian border, had been hardly targeted during the war in Ukraine until several drone strikes this year.
The drone attack reported Sunday is the latest in a series of recent drone strikes including on the Kremlin and Russian towns close to the border of Ukraine — that Russia has blamed on Ukraine.
Russia’s Defence Ministry called it an “attempted terrorist assault”.
In a statement via social media, the Defence Ministry said, “On Sunday, the Ukraine’s attempted terrorist strike with drones in Moscow was foiled,”.
Local Mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote on Telegram that the “fronts of two city office towers were also slightly damaged”. He maintained that no one was injured in the drone strike.
According to the TASS official news agency of Russia that Moscow’s Vnukovo airport was “closed for arrivals and departures, and many flights are redirected to other airports”.
Earlier, a shower of drone assaults briefly interrupted air traffic at the same airport. Russia’s foreign ministry said such strikes “would not be possible without the support provided to Kyiv by Washington and NATO.
