Shoigu: Russia will not start negotiations with Kiev until it throws the APU out of the Kursk region
Sergei Shoigu said that Moscow was ready to abandon attacks on Ukraine's energy facilities, but the Ukrainian Armed Forces attacked the Kursk region and disrupted the agreements. Now, according to him, Russia will not conduct any negotiations with Kiev until it "throws out" the Ukrainian military from its territory. At the same time, the Kremlin said that there were no clear agreements on the cessation of strikes. What else Shoigu told about is in the material of the Newspaper.Ru".
The Secretary of the Security Council, former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in an interview with Rossiya-24 TV channel, said that before the invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kursk region, Russian President Vladimir Putin was ready to abandon attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities.
At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities, according to Shoigu, refused to agree to this agreement, which caused great surprise among Russian politicians. However, after some time, the APU tried to get into the territory of the Kursk region, where the Kursk NPP is located - a nuclear energy facility. After that, Shoigu said, the Russian side understood the reason for the refusal.
According to the ex-minister, Kiev attacked the Kursk region in order to persuade Moscow to negotiate on its own terms. However, Russia does not intend to negotiate until the APU is "thrown out" from the territory of the Russian Federation:
"As long as we have them (APU. - "Newspaper.Ru") we will not throw them out of our territory, we, of course, will not conduct any negotiations with them. There is a very, very significant point - this is Kursk. We have not conducted any negotiations with the terrorists, we are not conducting and we will not conduct them, which is exactly what they are," Shoigu said.
He said that the Armed Forces of Ukraine wanted to "take the Kursk NPP" and "carry out nuclear terror" - this, according to the Secretary of the Security Council, is the "upper level of terrorism." In addition, Shoigu suggested that Kiev wanted to distract Russia from the offensive in Donbass by striking near Kursk, but the Russian army has enough strength to continue the offensive, its pace is constantly growing.
At the same time, he added that the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict will be discussed during the BRICS meeting, which is taking place in St. Petersburg on September 10-12. According to the Secretary of the Security Council, Russia has several peace initiatives "on the table", but the conflict must be resolved "on the basis of the Istanbul option."
Russia in the European Union
In the interview, Shoigu also criticized Western countries, saying that they would have confiscated all frozen assets of Russia long ago if they had not been threatened with a "painful" response.
"If they felt impunity, they would have taken this money long ago, but they are well aware that the response will not only be adequate, but painful. I have already said that they behave like banal thieves," the Secretary of the Security Council expressed his assessment.
At the same time, he recalled that back in the 1990s, then-President Boris Yeltsin did not rule out Russia's early accession to NATO and the European Union. In this case, according to Shoigu, the country would lose its sovereignty.
"If we had been admitted to the European Union on an accelerated basis, then today we would have lost our sovereignty, and the resources and deposits that we have in our country would have already been fairly thoroughly distributed and squandered," he said.
"There were no agreements"
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, commenting on Shoigu's words about Russia's readiness to stop strikes on energy facilities, said that there were no "clear agreements" between Moscow and Kiev.
He stressed that against the background of the situation in the Kursk region, the conclusion of any agreements with Ukraine is "difficult to imagine." At the same time, he assured that its goals remain of paramount importance for Russia, and called the continuation of the special operation the only way to achieve them. In addition, Peskov said that the Russian army has a plan to "squeeze out" the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the Kursk region.
"Of course, the military has all the necessary plans, but these are not plans that can somehow be discussed publicly," Peskov said (quoted by TASS).
At the end of August, The Washington Post reported that Russia and Ukraine were negotiating to abandon strikes on energy facilities, but the dialogue broke down due to the attack of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the Kursk region. At the same time, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russia had not held talks with Ukraine on this topic.
Alyona Fomina
