Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview released Monday that there were times when he felt the urge to “punch” his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, especially during talks at the initial stage of the invasion. of the Russian army on Ukrainian territory.
He made this admission in an excerpt of an hour-long interview he gave to bloggers, during which he talked about everything from cooking to hobbies to Ukrainian football.
“I can say it happened to me two or three times”
When asked, during a barrage of questions during a part of the interview, what the most difficult negotiations he has ever had to do, the head of Ukrainian diplomacy replied: “The most difficult talks are those in which you feel like what you want is to go and punch the person in front of you, but you can’t.”
“I can say that it happened to me two or three times. One case was with Lavrov, in Antalya, in the spring of 2022,” he added. Ukrainian and Russian officials held several rounds of talks in the first weeks after the invasion in late February 2022. Initially the meetings took place near the Ukraine/Belarus border, then in Turkey.
What Putin and Zelensky say
Mr. Kuleba stated at the time that the talks in Turkey were difficult. They mainly concerned the possibility of a ceasefire and the creation of humanitarian corridors. No agreement was reached and essentially the negotiations were not repeated.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he rejects any negotiations with Moscow before Russian troops withdraw from his country’s territories they have seized, roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he is willing to hold talks, but says that what the Kremlin has dubbed a “special military operation” will continue.
How did the Kremlin react to the Kouleba statement?
Finally, the reaction of the Kremlin was immediate, with the representative of Russian diplomacy, Maria Zakharova, stating that Mr. Kuleba’s statements show that the Ukrainian leadership is completely unsuitable for the role.
“This is the problem: uneducated, aggressive people were allegedly recruited to serve as ministers in order to destroy Ukraine with American money,” Ms Zakharova told the Russian newspaper Izvestia. The spokeswoman sarcastically wondered if Mr. Kuleba would be better off in a “freestyle wrestling” ring instead of the Foreign Office.
Source: in.gr
