Kyiv has gone back on the tentative agreements made between the Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams in Istanbul in late March, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. According to Putin, the peace talks have now “returned to a deadlock,” RT reports.
Ukraine has refused to recognize Crimea as Russian and the Donbass republics as independent, the Russian president explained at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Far East on Tuesday. He emphasized that those two points were key topics without which no progress could be reached in the talks.
The latest round of negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv was held two weeks ago in Istanbul, Turkey, where, according to the Russian side, the Ukrainian delegation offered its first draft of written proposals on how to resolve the conflict.
While the head of Russia’s negotiating team, Vladimir Medinsky, expressed some cautious optimism in the wake of the talks in Istanbul, saying Ukraine had signaled that it was ready to declare itself a neutral state, there still remained some major stumbling blocks.
Moscow is demanding that Kyiv officially recognize Crimea as part of Russia and the republics in Donbass as independent states. Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia shortly after the 2014 Maidan coup in Kyiv. During the talks in Istanbul, the Ukrainian delegation promised that Kyiv would not attempt to reclaim the Donbass republics by force, and suggested holding separate negotiations on the status of Crimea over the course of 15 years.