(Reuters) -Security guarantees for Ukraine cannot be provided by foreign military contingents and much work needs to be done before a high or top-level meeting between Moscow and Kyiv on settling the conflict in Ukraine, the Kremlin said on Friday.
On Thursday, 26 nations pledged to provide postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, which are to include an international force on land, sea and in the air.
“Can Ukraine’s security guarantees be ensured and provided by foreign, especially European and American, military contingents? Definitely not, they cannot,” the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russia’s RIA state news agency on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in the city of Vladivostok.
“This cannot serve as a security guarantee for Ukraine that would be acceptable to our country.”
Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to find a resolution to the conflict, there seems no end in sight to the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022.
Peskov also told RIA that all needed security guarantees for Ukraine were contained in the provisions of the agreements reached at peace talks in Istanbul in 2022.
Under the Istanbul framework, Ukraine would abandon NATO ambitions and adopt neutral, nuclear-free status. In exchange, it would receive security assurances from the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France.
Peskov also told RIA that Moscow is satisfied with the current level of representatives at the talks between Russia and Ukraine.
“Before meeting at a high or top level, a huge amount of, shall we say, work needs to be carried out to resolve minor issues, small technical matters, which together make up the entire settlement process,” Peskov said.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Kim Coghll)
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