MOSCOW, June 11 (Reuters) – Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin met the ambassadors of France, Germany and Britain in Moscow on Thursday and told them their countries were pursuing a “destructive policy” towards the Ukraine war.
The French ambassador, Nicolas de Riviere, told reporters outside the Foreign Ministry building the trio had had a “good discussion” with Galuzin and would release a statement later.
The meeting in Moscow took place after the leaders of France, Germany and Britain — who head an informal security alliance called the E3 that is one of Ukraine’s main sources of international support — met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in London last Sunday where they said they supported his call for a ceasefire.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Galuzin presented the diplomats with “an objective assessment of the destructive policy pursued by their countries’ leaderships regarding the Ukrainian crisis, which is aimed at maximally encouraging the Kyiv regime to continue the war against Russia on behalf of, at the expense of, and with the direct assistance of the Western ‘coalition of the willing’.”
“The Russian side’s fundamental approaches to seeking a political and diplomatic settlement of the conflict based on addressing its root causes were explained” by Galuzin, it said.
At Sunday’s meeting in Downing Street, the European leaders and Zelenskiy agreed that the current line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces should be the starting point for talks; that Ukraine should have legally binding security guarantees, including the deployment of a multinational force; and that frozen Russian financial assets would remain immobilised until Russia had compensated Ukraine for the damage caused by the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has stuck to his hardline stance on the war, but suggested last week that U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposals for peace could help end the fighting.
Putin told foreign reporters in St Petersburg that he was willing to talk to European politicians but that they were not the right people to broker an end to the war.
“What kind of mediator can the European Union or individual EU countries be when they directly assist a country with which we are in armed conflict?” he said.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan, William Maclean)
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