Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday (July 20) that it makes no sense to resume peace talks with Kyiv at the moment, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
"Denazification, demilitarisation in a sense that there are no military threats to our safety from the territory of Ukraine. This task remains. When the negotiators met in Istanbul, one sort of geography was discussed. Our willingness to accept the Ukrainian proposal was based on that geography, the geography of the end of March 2022. Now the geography is different, it's far from being just the DPR and LPR, it's also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories. And the process is continuing.
As the West pours more and more long-range weapons, such as HIMARS, into Ukraine in a impotent rage or in a desire to exacerbate the situation as much as possible, these HIMARS, (Ukraine's Defence Minister Oleksii) Reznikov or someone else was boasting that they have already received 300 km ammo - well, that means the geographical tasks of the special operation will extend still further from the current line. Because we cannot allow the part of Ukraine that will be controlled by Zelenskiy, or whoever replaces him, to contain weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory and the territory of the republics that have declared independence, those that want to determine their own future," Lavrov says.
Lavrov said the geographical objectives of what Moscow calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine were no longer limited to the eastern Donbas region.
