Any international peace summit on Ukraine that excludes Russia is solely “absurd” and can fail, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated in an interview printed on Tuesday. Peskov additionally advised the information outlet Argumenty I Fakty that Russia was pursuing its two-year-old warfare on Ukraine to guard itself from the West.

“Can the Ukrainian problem be resolved without Russia’s participation? The reply is clear – it cannot,” Peskov stated within the interview performed final Thursday, a day earlier than the mass capturing at a live performance corridor exterior Moscow. “Because Ukraine has been turned into an instrument in the hands of the collective West with whose help it intends, so it seems to them, to put more pressure on Russia, restrain Russia and abandon it to the fringes of development. And, should they succeed, to finish it off,” he added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has referred to as for a world peace summit, and earlier this yr Switzerland stated it could host the assembly, and {that a} date and the main points have been being mentioned. Russian President Vladimir Putin has already denounced as unworkable a Ukrainian peace plan calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops and the restoration of Kyiv’s 1991 borders, together with Crimea, seized and annexed by Russia in 2014.

Peskov reiterated that the plan was unthinkable, and in addition denounced plans mentioned by the European Union and different nations to take management of earnings from Russian property and switch them over to Ukraine. “I believe the Europeans understand that we will challenge such a decision. This is possibly a question not over a single year, but, rather decades,” he stated.