BERLIN, February 16. /TASS/. Diplomatic efforts on Ukraine are already underway, but peace talks will make no sense if Kiev's surrender is on the agenda, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in an interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

"Diplomatic efforts have been underway for a long time," he said, pointing to "talks involving representatives of the whole world" in Davos, Jeddah, Copenhagen and Malta.

"Of course, calls for negotiations alone do not solve the problem. If negotiations mean that Ukraine should simply capitulate, they are meaningless," Scholz said.

Once again, he argued that Russia could end the conflict "at any time" by pulling out its troops.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with journalist US Tucker Carlson that Russia had never given up on dialogue on Ukraine, but that it was not going to make the first step after Kiev terminated the talks in Istanbul in March 2022.

Istanbul talks

The first talks between Russia and Ukraine after the start of the special military operation were held in early March 2022 in Belarus without achieving tangible results. On March 29, 2022, another round was held in Istanbul, when Moscow first received from Kiev the principles of a possible future agreement described on paper. It included, among other things, commitments to Ukraine's neutral, non-aligned status and its refusal to accommodate foreign weapons, including nuclear weapons, on its territory.

Russian troops were pulled out of the Kiev and Chernigov areas, but after that the settlement talks were completely frozen. As the Russian president said, Kiev rejected the agreements. In October of the same year, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky enacted a decision of the National Security and Defense Council saying no talks with Putin were possible.

In November 2023, the head of the faction of the pro-presidential party Servant of the People in the Verkhovna Rada, David Arakhamiya, interviewed on the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, in response to a question about why Kiev had refused to hold talks with Moscow in 2022, replied that when the Ukrainian delegation returned from Istanbul, the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said no agreements would be signed at all and suggested the fighting should go on.