Russia: Upcoming Ukraine-West summit in Saudi Arabia a 'sham'
Russia has said that a planned meeting on Ukraine scheduled to be held in Saudi Arabia this week is intended to forge an anti-Russian coalition.
"The meeting initiated by the Kiev regime and its Western curators to promote Volodymyr Zelensky's [peace] formula is a sham," the Tass news agency quoted the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying on Wednesday.
"It’s another staged event to gather caring states under the guise of putting together an anti-Russian coalition, showing the pseudo unity of the world in terms of rejecting Russia's actions," she said.
Zakharova noted that the meeting was "bait" for those countries that are honestly seeking a peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian conflict in order to avoid further escalation.
"This is neither a conference of a scientific and practical nature nor a meeting of diplomats to find political solutions, but an attempt to take advantage of the sincere intentions of a number of states in order to forge an anti-Russian coalition," she said.
She added that these countries had been invited "with the aim of developing some kind of supposed peace initiative, to settle the situation."
The Wall Street Journal recently quoted sources as saying that Saudi Arabia planned to hold peace talks on Ukraine in Jeddah on August 5-6.
It was reported that the European Union, Britain, Poland and South Africa had already confirmed their participation in the consultations, and the presence of US presidential national security advisor Jake Sullivan was expected.
Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier that the meeting in Saudi Arabia would help the West to realize that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky's so-called peace plan is a dead end.
The Ukrainian president has been promoting his formula for peace with US President Biden and other leaders.
Zelenskyy has been actively promoting his 10-point peace plan, discussing it with US President Joe Biden among others, and urging world leaders to hold a global peace summit based on it.
Last year, Zelensky presented a 10-point peace formula to world leaders at the Group of 20 Summit in Indonesia. The plan envisions Russia giving up the four regions as well as Crimea, which it seized in 2014 and subsequently annexed.
The Kremlin has dismissed the peace plan by Ukraine’s President Zelensky, saying proposals to end the protracted war must take into account “today’s realities” of four Ukrainian regions that recently joined Russia.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said it is open to peace talks with Ukraine but sees no willingness to negotiate on the part of Kiev.
Regarding Moscow's conditions in the peace talks, Russian diplomats say the demilitarization of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine is among the main conditions the Kremlin has stated to end the war. The two regions broke away from Ukraine in 2014 after refusing to recognize a new government.
The Western world’s support for Ukraine’s military has run into billions of dollars, led by Washington.
Russia says its objective of military operation is to demilitarize the breakaway Ukrainian regions with ethnic Russian populations. Since the start of the war, the United States and Europe have slapped waves of sanctions on Moscow and have been assisting Ukraine with financial and military assistance.
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