MOSCOW, April 19. /TASS/. Russia always prefers talks to military confrontations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Sputnik, Govorit Moskva and Komsomolskaya Pravda radio stations.
"President [Vladimir Putin] keeps pointing out that we always prefer talks to fighting and wars," he noted.
According to Lavrov, when the Ukrainians realized that "they have gone too far with bombardments of Donbass and the use of direct methods of genocide against Russians on what they considered their own soil," they came up with an initiative to launch talks, which kicked off two to three weeks after the start of Russia’s special military operation. As a result of several rounds of talks, Kiev’s negotiators put their proposals on the table to resolve the situation, which were approved following discussions.
Those proposals "particularly contained obligations to revoke laws discriminating against ethnic minorities, primarily, the Russian one, and drop support for the movements based on Nazi ideas that were condemned at the Nuremberg Tribunal."
The first Russian-Ukrainian negotiations after the launch of Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine took place in Belarus in early March 2022 but the talks yielded no tangible results. A new round of negotiations was held in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, where Kiev for the first time presented the documented principles of a future agreement to Moscow. They particularly included Ukraine’s commitment to a neutral and non-aligned status and a move to give up plans to host foreign troops and armaments, including nuclear weapons. However, Ukraine unilaterally aborted the negotiation process.