Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs minister has said the Russian president thinks any negotiations with Ukraine are now “impossible” after Kyiv’s offensive.
Ukrainian forces unexpectedly breached Russian borders earlier this month and are now occupying around 1,000 sq km of land in the Kursk region.
The incursion is particularly remarkable considering Russia has not been invaded since World War 2.
Meanwhile, Russia is still occupying 109,000 sq km of Ukrainian land more than two years after invading its European neighbour in a land grab.
But Putin apparently cannot see the irony in this and is now just refusing to conduct any peace talks at all.
According to Russia’s state news agency TASS, the country’s foreign affairs minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday: “The president said it very clearly that following attacks, or even incursion, on the Kursk region, any talks are impossible.”
He also dismissed supposed “rumours” of “Qatar-brokered talks on issues of Russian and Ukrainian energy facilities”, Turkish mediators over food security around the Black Sea and talks over the return of prisoners.
These are three policy points Kyiv agreed to during a peace summit in Switzerland in June. There were no Moscow representatives there.
Ukraine wants to organise a second summit by the end of the year but Russia claims it has not been invited to that, either.
Lavrov said: “Whatever might be said about any hints that Russia would be invited there in some way, this is not true.”
He said these supposed negotiations are part of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “formula”for peace – and therefore the “entire process” is “unacceptable for us”.
Lavrov claimed: “Its only goal is to promote the ultimatum under the name of the ‘Zelenskyy formula’.”
His words echo the fury coming from Putin last week.
The Russian president said: “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population, and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities? What can we even talk about with them?”
Putin has actually been discriminately attacking Ukraine’s civilian population and infrastructure, and threatening the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in occupied Ukraine, for more than two years now as part of his land grab.
While Kyiv has already made it clear it does want to start peace talks, it does not want to negotiate directly with Putin.
Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesperson of the Ukrainian foreign ministry, said in a briefing last week: “The sooner Russia agrees to the restoration of a just peace, in particular, based on a peace formula that leads to such a peace, the sooner the raids of Ukrainian defence forces on Russian territory will stop.”
The head of the president’s office, Andriy Yermak, also said they are looking to negotiate using the Black Sea Model from July 2022, where Ukraine was allowed to resume grain exports out of the Black Sea.
Russia and Ukraine did not work together directly, but worked on separate agreements which were then overseen by go-betweens from the UN and Turkey.
“We did not have negotiations with Russia. We had negotiations with Turkey and the UN, and they negotiated with Russia. It was a success. The corridor operated for a year — there were a lot of problems, but it worked. We must acknowledge that. A similar format could be used again,” Yermak said.