MOSCOW, November 8. /TASS/. Russia and Ukraine have not held any constructive talks since April after Kiev had failed to respond to Moscow’s proposals, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during an online meeting with Kazan Federal University students and teaching staff Tuesday.
"There is indeed a lot of talk about negotiations but they are in a different context. There are no constructive talks, they ended this April when in response to Ukraine’s proposal we yet again sent our suggestions and following this, everything was blocked," she said.
According to the diplomat, the West, which supplies weapons to Ukraine, directly influences Kiev’s readiness for negotiations. "Now there are no questions as to who is behind them (official Kiev - TASS) - those who supply them with arms and provide them with huge sums of money, at times forbidding to even think about negotiations, and at times peddling a story that everything should be decided on the battlefield, yet later on [the West] once again returns to the issue of talks but in the context of accusing our country that we are not conducting them," she pointed out.
Situation around talks
On Monday, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin was unaware of how reliable reports were that the White House asked Kiev to demonstrate its openness to negotiations with Moscow. On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said that Moscow and Washington were not conducting any talks on the subject of Ukraine.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the Russian leadership remained ready to continue negotiations on Ukraine. He noted that Russia was ready to hear out its Western colleagues if they put forward a proposal to organize a dialogue on reducing tensions taking into account Moscow’s interests. Peskov also suggested that talks on Ukraine should be conducted above all with Washington since Kiev is acting "on external orders.".