WASHINGTON, November 9. /TASS/. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had to backtrack on his earlier claim about the impossibility of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s governent "due to soft nudging by the Biden administration," the Politico newspaper wrote citing own sources.
According to the paper, Zelensky made no mention of impossibility of talks with Putin when he listed five preconditions for talks with Moscow on Monday.
According to Politico, the change occurred after lengthy talks between Kiev and Washington, including during a visit to Kiev by the US president’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
The article says that US officials didn’t directly tell Zelenskyy and his aides in Ukraine to alter their position, but did relay that Kyiv must show its willingness to end the war "reasonably and peacefully."
One of the sources added that Washington does not think that the negotiations need to begin immediately.
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."
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that, in response to a request from the Donbass republics, he made a decision to carry out a special military operation in Ukraine. He underscored that Moscow does not plan to occupy Ukrainian territories, instead planning to demilitarize and denazify the country. In response, the West started introducing sweeping sanctions against Russia and shipping weapons and military vehicles to Kiev already worth tens of billions of dollars at this point.