A first round of talks between the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine has failed to yield progress on a ceasefire, Ukraine says.
Speaking after the meeting in Turkey, Dmytro Kuleba said that the demands his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov had made amounted to a surrender.
Mr Lavrov meanwhile said that his country’s military operation was going to plan.
The West was behaving dangerously by supplying weapons to Ukraine, he said.
The talks come a day after Ukraine accused Russia of bombing a children’s hospital in the city of Mariupol, calling it a “war crime”. Officials say three people including a child died in the attack. Russia said it would seek answers from its military about what had happened.
The worst humanitarian situation was in Mariupol, Mr Kuleba said. But Russia had not committed to establishing a humanitarian corridor there, he said.
It had not been easy to listen to Mr Lavrov during the meeting, Mr Kuleba said, and his counterpart’s broad thrust had been that Russia would continue attacking until Ukraine met Moscow’s demands.
But Ukraine would not surrender, the foreign minister said, even though it was ready to seek balanced diplomatic solutions and continue meeting.
Mr Lavrov said that Moscow was waiting for a response to its list of demands from Kyiv.
Russia insists that Ukraine abandons its stated plans to join the Nato military alliance, and becomes a neutral-status state. It also says Kyiv must accept Moscow’s jurisdiction over Crimea – the southern Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 – and must recognise two self-proclaimed rebel-held regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent.
The Russian foreign minister also alleged that Ukraine had been planning an attack on the two regions of eastern Ukraine.
(BBC)
