MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia takes a negative view of European proposals on security guarantees for Ukraine and will not accept any presence of NATO troops on its neighbour’s territory, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine as “very important” however, and said Moscow hoped they would continue.
As part of a potential peace settlement, Ukraine’s European allies are working to put together a set of guarantees for Ukraine that would protect it from a possible future attack by Russia.
But Peskov said a European troop deployment in Ukraine would mean a NATO presence there, which he said was something Russia had aimed to prevent from the start.
“In fact, at the very beginning, it was the advancement of NATO military infrastructure and the infiltration of this military infrastructure into Ukraine that could probably be named among the root causes of the conflict situation that arose,” he said.
“So we have a negative attitude towards these discussions.”
All sides agree that security guarantees for Ukraine must be part of any peace deal, but disagree fundamentally on what form they should take.
Russia says it should be one of the guarantors of Ukraine’s security and wants to revive a proposal that was discussed between the two sides in 2022, in the early weeks of the war. Kyiv rejects that, saying it would have given Moscow an effective veto over any outside military support for Ukraine.
Peskov said security guarantees were “one of the most important topics” but that Russia did not believe it was helpful to discuss them in public.
He said that this month’s U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had been “very substantive, constructive and useful”.
Trump has said the United States will not put troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of any future security guarantees. But he has left the door open to other U.S. military involvement, including air and intelligence support.
Peskov said Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators were in contact, but that he could not give a date for when they would meet again. The two sides last held face-to-face talks in Istanbul on July 23, in a session that lasted just 40 minutes.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Lucy PapachristouEditing by Andrew Osborn)
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