RT: Russian Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov © Sputnik / Alexander Kazakov
Russia is open to resuming dialogue with European nations, presidential aide Yury Ushakov told journalists on Wednesday. Western European leaders are the ones who have shunned contact, not Moscow, he added.
“The Europeans are refusing all contacts… even though [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly said that if any European leaders want to talk, they are welcome to come to Moscow.”
“For our part, we have nothing against resuming contacts,” Ushakov told a news briefing.
The EU and the UK have taken a hardline stance on the Ukraine conflict and have virtually severed all contacts with Moscow since the escalation of hostilities in February 2022.
The EU has been actively supporting Kiev with both financial and military aid and has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia. The bloc has also been seeking to seize Russian sovereign assets frozen at the Euroclear clearing house in Belgium to fund Ukraine. Moscow has warned that it would regard any such move as outright “theft.”
The bloc has de facto rejected a Ukraine peace plan presented by the administration of US President Donald Trump last month, and has put forward its own set of conditions, which Moscow dismissed as “unconstructive.”
On Tuesday, Putin said the EU is still living under the illusion that it can inflict a “strategic defeat” upon Russia through the Ukraine conflict. He stated that the concept was unrealistic from the very beginning, but Brussels cannot bring itself to admit that it has been wrong all along.
The bloc “does not have a peaceful agenda. They are on the side of war,” Putin told journalists on the sidelines of the ‘Russia Calling!” business forum.
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By Independent News Roundup