MOSCOW, April 11. /TASS/. Moscow stands for talks with Kiev, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
“President [of Russia Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly stressed that we prefer talks,” he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.
“I see no reasons for not continuing them [the talks], although the Ukrainian side tends to be evasive, sometimes doing U-turns and rejecting what it proposed a couple of days before. But we are persistent and patient,” he said.
The Russian-Ukrainian talks began on February 28, four days after the launch of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. Several meetings were held in Belarus to be continued in the online format. On March 10, Turkey organized a meeting between Foreign Ministers Sergey Lavrov of Russia and Dmitry Kuleba of Ukraine on the sidelines of a diplomatic forum in Antalya. Another offline round of talks was held in Istanbul on March 29.
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in response to a request for help by the heads of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories, but aimed to demilitarize and denazify the country.