Ned Price: Putin Continues To Stoke The War In Ukraine

The U..S State Department on Monday accused Russia of escalating the war in Ukraine and delaying negotiations instead of bringing the conflict to an end, TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.

The Kremlin is doing the opposite of ending the ongoing war in Ukraine, Spokesperson Ned Price told a daily press conference.

"If Russia is ready for that negotiation, it should stop its bombs. It should stop its missiles. It should stop attacking and killing Ukrainian civilians – pursuing infrastructure, including civilian infrastructure," he said in response to TURAN's questions.

The Kremlin, he said, instead "continuing to escalate this war rather than to offer any sort of real signal that it is ready for or open to negotiations".

Price went on to add "Russia should start by committing to renew the Black Sea grain initiative if it wants to demonstrate a “serious commitment to de-escalation”.

“If Russia wants to negotiate, why then did it walk away, even if temporarily, from the Black Sea Grain Initiative? That was perhaps the one forum where Russians and Ukrainians spoke and now speak, directly, on a daily basis,” he said.

Asked by TURAN whether Washington was pressuring Ukraine to negotiate with Putin, as suggested by media reports, Price pushed back saying that "our Ukrainian partners don’t need any pressure to incentivize them to see this war come to an end."

"No one has suffered more than the Ukrainian people. No one wants to see this war end more than the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian Government. So, it is neither our place for us to pressure the Ukrainians, nor would we need to do such a thing. They have every incentive. It is the Russians that are sending a very different signal," he added.

Price also responded questions about Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin's admission of election interference in the U.S, saying that it “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”

“His full confession, if anything, appears to be just a manifestation of the impunity that crooks and cronies enjoy under President Putin and the Kremlin,” he said.

Alex Raufoglu

Washington D.C.