Putin’s spokesman says Moscow will ‘continue’ invasion while blaming Ukraine for not being ‘ready’ for peace
A Kremlin spokesman said in a new interview that Ukraine is to blame for a failure to make progress in peace talks and vowed that the Russian offensive would “continue” – despite Kyiv’s support for a U.S.-backed deal.
With their respective nations still yet to reach a formal ceasefire, Ukraine and Russia’s ambassadors appeared for dueling interviews Sunday on ABC News.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin, spoke to ABC’s Martha Raddatz in Moscow.
“Ukraine is trying to escape from negotiations,” he claimed.
Raddatz interjected: “Ukraine says they’re ready for a ceasefire right now, a 30 days ceasefire.”
“But they’re not ready for immediate negotiations,” Peskov said. “President Putin is doing whatever is possible to solve the problem, to achieve a settlement through peaceful and diplomatic means. But having no peaceful and democratic means at hand, we have to continue military operation.”
He would go on to say that U.S. and European weapon shipments to Kyiv would need to be halted for those talks to take place.
“Otherwise, it will be advantage for Ukraine. Ukraine will continue their total mobilization, bringing new troops to front line. Ukraine will use this period to train new military personnel and to give a rest to their existing ones,” said Peskov. “So why should we grant such an advantage to Ukraine?”
Ukraine is “not ready for immediate negotiations,” he insisted.
Separately on ABC News, Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova sat down in-studio for an interview with Raddatz. She shot down Peskov’s assertion that Ukraine was refusing the possibility of talks beginning at once.
“President Zelensky today already said that, yes, Ukraine is ready to negotiate,” Markarova said. Ukraine has set a temporary ceasefire as a condition for talks to take place. Russia, meanwhile, said that it would not accept the presence of European peacekeeping forces.
“We have heard loud and clear from President Trump that ceasefires should be full and unconditional. And we have heard from other European leaders,” she continued. “Nobody wants peace more than Ukraine. The question of the day is whether Russia wants it.”
President Donald Trump spent much of 2024 hammering his two opponents, Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris, for the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts, which he says started under their watch. The 47th president claimed often that Putin would not have dared to launch an invasion of Ukraine in 2022 had he been in office, and boasted as well that he could end the eastern European conflict in a matter of hours.
Those hours have stretched into weeks as Trump has come to publicly grumble that Russia may be stringing his administration along in the hopes of securing a more advantageous position on the battlefield. The U.S. president has threatened damaging sanctions against Moscow if the conflict continues, but has yet to act on those threats.
