(Reuters) – Russia will take no part in any follow-up to the Swiss-organized “peace summit” held in June as the process amounts to “fraud,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday.
Russia was not invited to the June meeting, attended by delegations from more than 90 countries, and dismissed its deliberations as meaningless without Moscow’s participation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he hopes to organise a follow-up meeting by the end of the year with Russia attending.
“This process itself has nothing to do with a settlement,” Zakharova wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “It is another manifestation of fraud by the Anglo-Saxons and their Ukrainian puppets.”
She said Russia was ready to discuss “truly serious proposals” that take account of the “situation on the ground” – an oblique reference to Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions, though without fully occupying any of them.
Ukraine and its Western backers were “not thinking about peace,” she said, citing Ukraine’s incursion into southern Russia’s Kursk region, launched last month, and to Zelenskiy’s persistent appeals for long-range Western weaponry.
On the eve of the June summit, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin set conditions for holding talks with Ukraine, including a demand that Kyiv abandon all four of the regions Moscow now claims as its own. Moscow has since said it can hold no talks while Ukrainian troops are in its Kursk region.
Zelenskiy has based Kyiv’s position on a “peace formula” presented at the end of 2022, including withdrawal of all Russian troops, reaffirming Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders and a mechanism to bring Moscow to account for the invasion.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksander Kozhukhar; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
