“I was surprised that the line of leaders who wanted to shake hands with US President Barack Obama was significantly smaller than the line of leaders who wanted to shake hands with Putin,” he said in the BBC documentary “Putin vs. the West.”

As RIA Novosti clarifies, in June 2014, during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, the leaders of Russia, Germany, Ukraine and France discussed the settlement of the conflict in Donbass for the first time.