Ned Price
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.
Politics
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On 28 December, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov.
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On December 28 president of Ukrain called to the president of Azerbaijan İlham Aliyev.
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The preliminary investigation into the case of Russian oligarch and former "state minister" of the separatist regime of Nagorno-Karabakh, Ruben Vardanyan, has been completed. According to a joint statement by the Prosecutor General's Office and the State Security Service of Azerbaijan, Vardanyan has been charged under the following articles of the Azerbaijani Criminal Code: Article 100 (planning or waging aggressive war), Article 107 (deportation or coercion of the population), Article 109 (persecution), Article 112 (deprivation of liberty in violation of international law), Article 113 (torture), Article 114 (mercenary activities), Article 115 (violating laws and customs of war), Article 116 (violating laws and customs of war), Article 214 (terrorism), Article 214-1 (financing terrorism), Article 218 (organization of a criminal community), Article 228 (illegal trafficking in weapons), Article 270-1 (creating threats to aviation safety), Article 278 (violent seizure of power or violent retention of power, violent change of the constitutional order of the state), Article 279 (creation of illegal armed formations), Article 318 (illegal crossing of the Azerbaijani state border).
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On December 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, as reported by the Kremlin's press service. During the conversation, the issues related to the crash of the AZAL passenger plane on December 25 near the city of Aktau were discussed in detail. "Vladimir Putin expressed his apologies for the tragic incident occurring in Russian airspace and once again conveyed his deep and sincere condolences to the families of the victims, wishing a speedy recovery to the injured," the statement emphasized.
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