MOSCOW, February 19. /TASS/. Russia views statements that only the United States was able to get Russia and Ukraine to sit down at the negotiating table as inaccurate, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, commenting on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks.

"To say that only the United States managed to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table is, to say the least, incorrect. Moreover, the terminology itself is hardly appropriate from a diplomatic point of view," she said.

She described the United States’ position as "unique." "On the one hand, the [US President] Donald Trump team has ‘inherited’ from the Biden administration the Ukrainian conflict, which continues to be supported by American arms supplies to the Ukrainian army," she noted. "On the other hand, the current US leadership, as we see, is making efforts to find ways out of the crisis around Ukraine, which was instigated by Washington itself more than ten years ago."

Zakharova recalled that many countries offered their services to organize meetings between Moscow and Kiev. "Several rounds of talks were held in Belarus’ Gomel and Brest Regions in February-March 2022, when the first elements of future settlement agreements were elaborated," she pointed out. "Contacts continued via video links, and then in Turkey. During a regular round of the Russia-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, the heads of the two countries’ delegations reached a shared understanding on a draft agreement on the Ukrainian crisis settlement. We are thankful to our Belarusian and Turkish partners for their assistance in organizing those meetings."

However, in her words, Ukraine’s Anglo-Saxon sponsors were not happy about the prospects of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. "That is why then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was urgently sent to Kiev to ban the Zelensky regime from further dialogue with Moscow and demand he continue fighting with our country ‘until the last Ukrainian,’" she noted.

"Nevertheless, being guided by the preference of political and diplomatic ways of achieving the goals of the special military operation, on the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin, we managed to resume direct talks with Kiev in Istanbul in May 2025 after they had been interrupted at the West’s instigation," the Russian diplomat went on to say. "Three rounds were held on May 16, June 2, and July 23, 2025. They yielded important agreements on the exchanges of prisoner of war and civilian detainees, as well as on the repatriation of bodies of killed soldiers."

"Apart from that, we handed over to the Ukrainian side a memorandum with our settlement proposals, initiated the establishment of a bilateral ceasefire control and monitoring center, and working groups on military, political, and humanitarian issues. We were ready to constructively consider Kiev’s idea of raising the level of the delegations. Regrettably, there has been no response to any of these proposals. And in November 2025, the Ukrainian foreign ministry announced the termination of the talks due to an alleged lack of ‘tangible progress,’" she stressed.