After Zelensky asked Putin to sit down with him at the negotiating table, Kremlin replied that Vladimir Putin was prepared to send a delegation to Minsk for negotiations on Ukraine’s neutrality as Russia continued its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Dmitry Peskov, the Russian president’s spokesman, said that Russia was ready to send a group from its defence and foreign ministries alongside Kremlin officials for talks with Ukraine in the Belarusian capital.
Russia’s conditions, however, in effect amounted to Ukraine’s surrender. Peskov said that Russia considered “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, Putin’s ostensible reason for the invasion, to be an “inseparable component of neutral status”.
Earlier, the Ukrainian president called on Russian president Vladimir Putin to negotiate in order to “stop the death”, while urging European citizens to protest in order to force their governments to act more decisively.
Addressing the nation on television, Volodymyr Zelensky said: “The German chancellor yesterday talked about the invasion of Ukraine, that Europe had not seen something like this for 75 years. But this is not the entire truth. This is not only Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is the beginning of a war against Europe. Against European solidarity. Against elementary rights of European people.”
“How do you plan on defending yourselves when you so slowly help us?” Zelensky added.
More precisely, the Ukrainian president Zelensky called for isolating Russia by cutting it off from the Swift financial system, calling back diplomats from Moscow, imposing an oil embargo and enforcing a no-fly zone in Ukraine’s airspace.