At a meeting with the heads of the municipalities that make up the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, the president of the aggressor state, expressed his dissatisfaction over Ukraine’s reluctance to engage in negotiations and condemned the Ukrainian side, saying that “everything would have ended long ago.”

Source: broadcast of Putin’s speech; Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti

Quote: “Having refused to negotiate, and they have done exactly that! But let me remind you, in Istanbul they agreed on everything – I’m saying this to you, the heads of the municipal authorities; all citizens should know this, and it is you who work directly with people. We agreed on everything. Moreover, the head of the negotiating group from Ukraine even put his signature under this. The signature is there, we have the document. They just told us that we need to show a sign that Russia really intends to resolve these issues peacefully, that we need to withdraw troops from Kyiv, which we have done. A day later, they threw all the arrangements into the trash.”

Details: Putin also started to gripe about how the previous Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson had overturned agreements with Russia. “They are idiots, aren’t they? And he [Johnson – ed.] says it directly: ‘If we had agreed on it, this would have ended a year and a half ago’.”

Putin additionally described President Zelenskyy’s Peace Formula “a continuation of the implementation of the decree of the President of Ukraine on the prohibition to negotiate with Russia.” Commenting on that, he said “And what is that? Those are unreasonable demands within the negotiation process.”

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