This past Wednesday evening, just a few hours before Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was to arrive in the resort city of Antalya in southern Turkey for the peace talks, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk defiantly stated about the supposed “peace terms” put forth by Russia, stating, “There is only one discussion to be had: Russia’s capitulation.”
While appearing on BBC’s Newsnight, she also stated, as reported by The Daily Mail:
I think that in order to make demands you need to meet, you need to talk. But of course, the ultimatums that Russia has put forward are unacceptable: to recognize Crimea, to recognize the separatist republics as independent states, this is completely impossible.
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Of course we cannot trade away our territory, we would have to amend the constitution. How could we look the Ukrainian people in the eye and calmly give away a part of sovereign independent Ukraine. How will we look our children in the eyes? This is aggression, not just against Ukraine as you can clearly see. This is a challenge to the whole world.
Russia has issued demands stating that the Ukrainian military stop all actions, change its constitution to state that it cannot join NATO, and officially state that Crimea is a sovereign Russian territory and that Luhansk and Donetsk are both independent territories.
While speaking on the outright refusal from the United Kingdom and the United States to set up no-fly zones due to worries of provoking a nuclear response from Russia because of the risk of outright nuclear warm, exclaimed Vereshchuk, “And the fact that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is no longer under our control? You don’t think that is a nuclear standoff with Russia? … Putin is raising the stakes, he knows that. Who do you think this is aimed at? President Zelensky, or President Biden?”
She also stated that she was seeking the West “to help us to impose a no-fly zone, at least over critical infrastructure. We would like air defense systems.”
As stated on Thursday by Lavrov, nuclear war would not be instigated by the war in Ukraine. As reported by Reuters:
Asked by a Kremlin correspondent for Russia’s Kommersant newspaper if he thought a nuclear war could be triggered, Lavrov told reporters in Turkey: “I don’t want to believe it, and I do not believe it…. Of course it gives us cause for concern when the West, like Freud, keeps on returning and returning to this topic.”
Lavrov also stated, “We’ll emerge from this crisis with a revitalized psychology and conscience: We won’t have any illusions that the West can be a reliable partner.”
“We will do everything to ensure that we never again depend on the West in those areas of our life which have a significant meaning for our people,” he stated.
All the while, Rostec CEO and Putin ally Sergey Chemezov stated, “If you glance at Russia’s history, almost all of that history Russia has battled with different sanctions, with enemies which encircled her, and she always came out as the victor…Now will be the same.”
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