President Vladimir Putin declared on Tuesday that peace negotiations with Ukraine had reached a stalemate, vowing that his soldiers would triumph and chastising the West for failing to bring Moscow to heel.
It was Putin's first public comment on the crisis in more than a week. Putin claimed that Russia will achieve all of its "noble" goals in Ukraine, speaking in public for the first time since Russian soldiers retreated from northern Ukraine after being halted at the gates of Kyiv.
Vladimir Putin Says Ukraine Blocks Peace Talks Through Fake Allegations
Putin said Kyiv blocked peace negotiations by staging what he called phony charges of Russian war crimes and demanding security guarantees covering the entire country, sending the strongest hint yet that the war will drag on for longer.
The conflict has been denounced by the West as a savage imperial territorial grab aimed at a sovereign country. Ukraine claims it is battling for survival after Russian President Vladimir Putin took Crimea in 2014 and recognized two of its separatist areas as autonomous on February 21. Putin called the sanctions imposed by the West, which have pushed Russia into its worst recession since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a failure.
Putin has mostly faded from public view since Russia's pullout from northern Ukraine two weeks ago, after being omnipresent on Russian television in the early days of the war. His lone public appearance in the last week was at the burial of a nationalist politician, during which he did not mention the conflict. He visited the Austrian chancellor on Monday at a rural estate outside of Moscow, but no photos of the encounter were released, according to Reuters.
Following Russian soldiers' retreat from Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the almost seven-week-old conflict might enter a "new stage of terror" for his nation. He accused Russia of war crimes once more. Negotiations were "very difficult," according to Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian negotiator and presidential advisor, in a statement. "But they are proceeding," he said.
Officials from the United States and Ukraine were attempting to determine if Russia had used or intended to use chemical weapons in an attempt to retake Mariupol. A rebel leader supported by Russia, who had previously threatened to use them, denied using them on Tuesday.
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Russia Attempts To Redeploy, Regroup Forces
After failing to capture the capital, Russia is now attempting to regroup and redeploy its forces in preparation for an all-out assault in Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland, the country's military said in its latest operational report. It also said Ukraine thwarted half a dozen Russian attacks in the previous 24 hours in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Investigators and Ukrainian troops moved forward with the bleak and dangerous task of recovering civilian bodies and clearing away ordnance left behind in houses and garden sheds, in buildings and on streets, some even rigged on corpses, in the devastated outlying areas of Kyiv that endured a month-long Russian occupation.
According to the most recent assessment from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, more than 1,890 people were killed, including 153 children, as per LA Times via MSN.
In an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes on Sunday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said it would be worthwhile to meet with his Russian counterpart for face-to-face peace negotiations, conceding that they would not agree on everything but may agree on a truce. Although certain humanitarian corridors have been agreed upon to allow civilians to flee, talks between the two parties have so far failed to deliver a peace accord.
According to Zelensky, Moscow would most likely ask to seize some of this land during discussions, Newsweek via MSN reported.
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