The Russian Foreign Ministry called the best option for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine

Alexei Polisiuk, director of the second department of the CIS states of the Russian Foreign Ministry, told the TASS news agency that negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv should be direct and take place without intermediaries.

,,Usually, Western mediators pursue their own goals and try to influence the course of negotiations, acting not to resolve the conflict, but to promote their economic and political interests’’, Polisiuk said.

The diplomat added that in 2022, all the direct negotiations with Kyiv took place onprovided platforms and via video links.

After the start of the war in Ukraine, there were several rounds of face-to-face talks between contact groups. Representatives of Moscow and Kyiv have met repeatedly in Belarus, and the last direct meeting of the delegations took place in Istanbul on March 29, 2022.

Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the president of the Russian Federation, recently said that Russia is ready to contribute to the settlement of the conflict in Ukraine through negotiations, although such prospects are lacking, even if Kremlin wants to achieve its goals through peaceful, political and diplomatic means.

,,With the laws of Ukraine prohibiting the Ukrainian president from having any dialogue with us, also the fact that the Westerners are, of course, not inclined to allow Kyiv to act on its own - we have no opportunities to focus on’’, Peskov said.

At the end of September last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he would not negotiate with Moscow as long as Vladimir Putin is holding the position of Russian head of state.