Russia’s offer for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine conflict is a realistic way to end the hostilities, but the West is simply ignoring it, President Vladimir Putin has said.
In a keynote foreign policy speech earlier this month, the Russian leader promised to order a ceasefire if Ukraine vows not to seek membership in NATO and withdraws its troops from all territories claimed by Russia. Kiev immediately rejected the proposal.
In an address to an international forum hosted by Russia this week, Putin said his offer should be carefully considered by interested parties.
”Unlike many Western politicians who didn’t even bother to get to the core of the initiative we proposed, participants of this forum, I expect, will study it thoughtfully and rationally and will see that it gives a real opportunity to stop the conflict and move to its political-diplomatic resolution,” a written welcome message from Putin said, as read on Tuesday by his foreign policy aide, Yury Ushakov.
Ushakov went on to say that Moscow is offering a “chance to at once stop the settlement of our differences on the battlefield and the loss of life,” adding, however, that the West wants to keep fighting Russia “to the last Ukrainian.”
“For now, the West-spurred military frenzy” is not subsiding, he lamented, citing Ukraine’s missile attack last Sunday which injured over 150 civilians and claimed at least four lives at a beach in Sevastopol, Crimea.
Moscow claims that Washington shares responsibility for the strike, since Ukraine used US-supplied ATACMS missiles with cluster munition warheads. Some Russian officials have argued that American military specialists must have been directly involved in the use of the sophisticated weapon. Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, claimed that the beachgoers were “civilian occupiers.”
Ushakov stated that Russia has the overarching goal of creating an indivisible pan-Eurasian security system to replace the “Euroatlantic and Eurocentric models that are passing into oblivion.”
He added that it is time to seriously devise a way to ensure peace in the space “that covers Western and Eastern states and Russia in between them.” The participants of the forum – the Primakov Readings, named after the late Russian diplomat Evgeny Primakov – are among the experts who can accomplish this, Ushakov noted.