MOSCOW (Reuters) -The Kremlin said on Wednesday that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s views on Ukraine peace talks should be disregarded after he made what Moscow called a series of “unfavourable” remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Merz said in an interview with broadcaster ProSieben.Sat1 aired on Tuesday that Putin was “perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time” and that there was no place for leniency for such individuals.
The Kremlin denies its forces have committed any war crimes in Ukraine. It has rejected as “outrageous” a 2023 arrest warrant issued for Putin by the International Criminal Court which accused the Russian leader of the war crime of abducting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
Asked during a trip to China about a proposal from Merz that Geneva should be the venue for Ukraine-Russia peace talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Merz has made a lot of unfavourable statements in recent hours, so it’s hardly possible to take his opinion into account at the moment.”
Asked which statements he meant, Peskov said: “About our president”.
Merz said in his interview on German TV: “He (Putin) is a war criminal. He is perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time that we currently see on a large scale. And we must simply be clear about how one deals with war criminals. There, appeasement is out of place.”
(Reporting by Reuters Moscow buro and Kirsti Knolle in Berlin; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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