MOSCOW, February 18. /TASS/. Russia is ready to end the conflict in Ukraine peacefully, but there are no signs that Kiev wants this, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with Rossiya-1 TV channel’s journalist Pavel Zarubin.

"People from Donbass <…> turned to Russia as a guarantor," he said in an interview to the program called "Moscow. Kremlin. Putin". "We transitioned from peaceful instruments [of settlement] to instruments of military nature, but then also we sought to end the conflict peacefully, and we agreed on the parameters in Istanbul," the president added.

"If it hadn’t been for the position of the West, <…> the war would have stopped as long as a year and a half ago," Putin said. "But they (the government in Kiev - TASS) didn’t want it. I don’t know if they want it today. We are ready for dialogue," he noted.

Moscow accepted the Minsk accords, "expecting its partners to be decent", and "trying to implement them no matter how complicated they were for both sides," for Ukraine and for Donbass, the Russian president said.

He added that he thought how the Russian side "would convince people living in Donbass to accept those agreements." "But we thought that we would do it, however, the other side was not even going to," Putin stressed. "The incumbent leadership of Ukraine announced via its first person that it liked nothing in those Minsk accords," he added. "Someone from their team <…> said that nothing would be implemented. It became clear that it was useless," Putin concluded.