There are opportunities for dialogue between Moscow and Ukraine, and neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have ever talked about closing that door.

This was stated by the press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov to RIA Novosti.

“Neither the president nor the minister has ever talked about closing the door to negotiations,” Peskov stressed.

Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, during an interview with RT and RIA Novosti, said that in the current situation, peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv do not make sense.

“In the current situation, it makes no sense.

In Tehran, following the results of his talks with the leaders of Iran and Turkey, giving a press conference at the end of the working day, late at night, he touched on this topic.

He reminded once again: as soon as the Ukrainian leadership asked to start negotiations at the very beginning of the special military operation, we did not refuse, we honestly approached this process, ”Lavrov said in an interview with Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the RT channel and the Rossiya Segodnya media group.

The minister recalled that the first rounds of negotiations with Ukraine, which took place in Belarus, "just revealed the lack of desire on the part of the Ukrainian side to seriously discuss anything."

“Then we gave them our assessment of the situation and said: “If you seriously want to work, give us something on paper so that we understand what specific agreements you want to talk about.”

They gave us a paper, which, by the way, we supported ... We were ready to conclude an agreement based on their principles.

They were given a document which, I emphasize once again, was written based on their logic.

On April 15, they received such a document - and since then nothing has been heard from them, ”the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry stated.

“But something else is heard,” the minister continued.

— You can hear what both Scholz and Boris Johnson said (apparently, he doesn’t talk about it now), Ursula von der Leyen and many others, including Borrell, the chief diplomat, say that Ukraine must win on the battlefield and should not now go to negotiations, because she has a weak position at the front.

First, Ukraine must correct this situation, begin to dominate the Russian armed forces, over the Donetsk, Luhansk militias, and only then start talking from a position of strength.

I think that all this… They say “for the benefit of the poor” – this is for the benefit of the poor.”

Commenting on Kyiv's position on dialogue with Russia, Lavrov in early April noted the Ukrainian side's inability to negotiate and its "line of delaying and even undermining negotiations through a departure from the understandings being reached." 

“We see this as a manifestation of the fact that the Kyiv regime is controlled by Washington and its allies, who are pushing President Zelensky to continue hostilities,” the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry noted.

At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a working visit to Tehran on July 19, said that the Kyiv authorities refused to implement the agreements, although they were practically reached.

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“There were well-known negotiations in Istanbul, when we actually reached an agreement, it only remained to initial it, but, as you know, after that (and in order to create these conditions, our troops withdrew from the center of Ukraine, from Kyiv), the Kyiv authorities refused to execute these agreements.

They were actually achieved,” Vladimir Putin recalled.

The head of state stressed that the final result of the negotiations depends primarily on the desire of the parties to fulfill the agreements reached.

“And we see today that the Kyiv authorities have no such desire,” the president stated.