WASHINGTON, May 13. /TASS/. Details over the territory in Ukraine, the use of the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), and Kiev’s access to the Dnieper River and the Black Sea remain major issues to be discussed, according to the US president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
"I think the major issues here are the regions, the nuclear plant, it’s how the Ukrainians are able to use the Dnieper River and get out to the ocean," Witkoff told Breitbart News in an interview. "I think we’ve done a lot to narrow the issues. The major sticking points are down to the five regions. Russia has control — overwhelming control — of two of those regions. The Ukrainians have some degree of control over three other regions, so it’s about how we’re going to assess — there’s a difference between where the battle line are, where the troops are, and the administrative lines. So we’re in a conversation with both sides informally," he continued.
"We want to be direct and at the bargaining table directly, but we’re in a conversation about what you would accept, Russia, in some of these areas. Would you retreat back behind certain administrative lines? The same thing with the Ukrainians," Witkoff explained. He called the Zaporozhye nuke plant "a big part of this discussion because it’s a little bit of a crown jewel." According to him, "it’s been closed, but we need to reopen that because it delivers a lot of electricity into some of the cities in Kiev." "These are sort of the issues. How Ukraine is going to access the water and get their goods to the marketplace?" Witkoff asked.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that the new regions will be forever Russian. In late April, Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, said that Moscow had not received any request from the United States to hand over control of the ZNPP to it. "If we ever do, we will make it clear that the power station is in Russian control and that no change here is conceivable," Lavrov noted.
Speaking to reporters in the Kremlin in the small hours of May 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited the Kiev authorities to resume the direct talks they broke off in 2022 without any preliminary conditions. He proposed to launch a dialogue on May 15 in Istanbul. The Russian leader recalled that Russia had declared ceasefires more than once but all of them, including the latest three-day V-Day truce, were violated by the Kiev regime.
New Russian regions
Crimea and Sevastopol rejoined Russia after a referendum in March 2014 amid a coup in Ukraine. More than 80% of eligible voters on the peninsula took part in the plebiscite, with 96.7% of Crimean residents and 95.6% of Sevastopol citizens voting to become part of Russia.
From September 23 to September 27, 2022, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) as well as the Kherson Region and the Zaporozhye Region held a referendum where the majority of voters opted to join Russia.
On September 30, 2022, Putin and the heads of the DPR and the LPR, the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions signed treaties on their accession to Russia. And on October 4, 2022, the Russian leader signed laws ratifying the four regions’ accession to the Russian Federation.