Head of the Presidential Office Kirill Budanov stated that during the past negotiations, the Russian side approved security guarantees for Ukraine from the US. He also said that the greatest progress has been made on the issue of the demilitarized zone.
He said this while talking to journalists.
According to Budanov, the Russian negotiating team at past talks affirmatively stated that it approves of the security guarantees offered to Ukraine by the United States.
“Regarding security guarantees. So, at the past negotiations, the Russian side, for example, directly said that they would accept the security guarantees that the United States offered to Ukraine. And there's no getting away from it, as they say. What the United States is offering, they (the Russians — ed.) directly say that yes, well, we will be forced, we are ready to accept them. For Ukraine, these are our guarantees, and they will have to respect them,” he said.
Regarding the issue of control over the demilitarized zone and the issue of monitoring the ceasefire, the official noted that this is a task for the military subgroup of the Ukrainian negotiating team, but emphasized “maximum progress” in this section of the peace track.
“Actually, well, we can say that in principle we have come to a conclusion about how all this monitoring will work when the war ends. There are no longer any special problems there. They have solved them all during these few meetings that have taken place,” Budanov said.
At the same time, in territorial issues, according to him, all parties are at the stage of searching for a “compromise.”
“We haven't found it yet… I hope we will. We don't have much time for that. In the end, we will have to state that either we have found a solution and we are all ending this entire war, or we all take responsibility for not finding a solution and continuing to kill each other, which we are doing quite qualitatively and professionally,” the head of the OPU added.
The latest round of trilateral talks between Kyiv, Washington, and Moscow took place in Geneva, Switzerland, on February 26. Particular attention was focused on the economic bloc and long-term support mechanisms for Ukraine.
On February 28, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that he had updated “directives” for the Ukrainian delegation regarding further trilateral talks between Ukraine, the United States, and the Russian Federation on potential parameters for ending the war.