Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said today that there has been no contact with the United States regarding peace talks with Ukraine.
“The US government forbids its protégés in Kyiv to even think about talks with us, and apparently forces them to fight to the last Ukrainian,” Zakharova told reporters.
Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have been frozen since early April, when ceasefire talks in Istanbul collapsed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky downplayed the prospect of peace talks as long as Russian troops still occupy Ukrainian territory. Yesterday, Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that peace talks with Ukraine “make no sense”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on July 7 that his country “has not yet started anything serious” in Ukraine, and challenged the West to try to defeat it on the battlefield.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman also accused Kyiv of launching drone strikes this week in the area of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, which has been under the control of Kremlin forces since March.
“It confirms the desire of the Ukrainian authorities to create the conditions for a nuclear disaster not only on their territory, but also throughout Europe,” Maria Zakharova argued at the weekly press conference.
It did not mention damage that jeopardizes the nuclear safety of the facilities.
He said Ukrainian forces carried out a drone strike on Monday “several tens of meters from the plant’s safety-critical structures, a spent nuclear fuel tank and a reactor cooling tank”.
The representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs added that Kyiv hit the region again yesterday, Wednesday. Russian media published images purported to show smoke in the city of Energondar, where the station is located. AFP notes that it cannot independently verify this information.
Maria Zakharova said Moscow contacted the International Atomic Energy Agency secretariat after the two incidents.
Last week, Ukraine’s nuclear power agency, Energoatom, for its part, accused the Russian military of placing rocket launchers in the vicinity of the Zaporizhia plant, Europe’s largest. According to Energoatom, about 500 Russian military personnel were at the site. When it seized the station in early March, the Russian military had opened fire on the facility’s buildings, risking a major nuclear accident.
Source: AMPE
Source: Capital
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