MOSCOW, February 25. /TASS/. The Ukrainian side in response to an idea to hold talks in Minsk, suggested Warsaw instead and then stopped communicating, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
"After a brief pause, the Ukrainians stated that they were reconsidering the idea with Minsk and that now they wanted to go to Warsaw and after this cut off communication altogether, took a pause," the Kremlin official told journalists.
According to the Kremlin official, this pause "has been for a rather long time." That said, he emphasized that "unfortunately, this pause is accompanied by the fact that in [Ukraine’s] major cities, what the president was talking about at the Security Council [is happening], nationalist elements are deploying multiple launch rocket systems in residential quarters, including in Kiev." "We consider this situation extremely dangerous," he noted.
Putin’s press secretary stated that the Kremlin wanted to absolutely openly describe this situation.
At a special briefing for journalists, the Kremlin spokesman stressed that "it is very important to reconstruct the chain of events so that it would be clear." "We want to be transparent here to the utmost degree," he emphasized. The Kremlin official called the current situation "a very important story." He reiterated that earlier on Friday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky made a statement on his readiness to discuss Ukraine’s neutral status. "This was one very important condition for the resolution of the crisis that President Vladimir Putin was talking about and that, essentially, was at the foundation of the goal that is being pursued during this special military operation," the Kremlin official noted.
He added that, considering this offer by Zelensky, Putin agreed to hold such talks in Minsk. "Putin immediately called [Belarusian] President [Alexander] Lukashenko and arranged for the Belarusian side to do everything in order to organize in the best way possible both the arrival of delegations and the guarantee of their security, this element is also very important now, and conditions to hold precisely these talks," the press secretary added. He also reported that at the president’s instructions, the Russian side immediately formed a delegation consisting of the representatives of the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the presidential administration. "All this information was conveyed to the Ukrainians," he said.