MOSCOW, March 12. /TASS/. Ukraine will not acknowledge the loss of territory in potential talks on resolving the conflict with Russia, Vladimir Zelensky said.
"We will not recognize any territories occupied by the Russian Federation. That’s a fact," he pointed out, when asked if Ukraine had any red lines in talks on settling the conflict.
Zelensky added that neither would he violate the Ukrainian constitution and restrict the country’s sovereignty. However, he did not explain what he meant by those words. Notably, Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO is enshrined in the country’s constitution.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated earlier that Washington had touched upon the issue of Ukraine’s territorial concessions during the March 11 talks in Saudi Arabia. The head of Zelensky’s office did not confirm the fact immediately after the meeting.
Zelensky himself did not specify if the issue had been raised in Saudi Arabia. "There were a lot of various details that I would like not to discuss because they weren’t mentioned in the final statement," he noted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with senior Foreign Ministry officials in June 2024 that Moscow was ready to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. His terms included Ukraine recognizing the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as parts of Russia; the move to guarantee Ukraine’s non-bloc and non-nuclear status, along with the country’s demilitarization and denazification, and the lifting of sanctions on Moscow. Putin stressed that Russia would be ready to end military operations once Ukraine withdrew all of its forces from the DPR, LPR, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions.