Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that Ukraine will try to "restart" the diplomatic process to end the war with Russia, Reuters reported, BTA reported.
"It is important that while this continues, we feel constant support behind us," Zelensky said at a press conference in Madrid together with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
He later stressed that he planned to discuss tomorrow with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan how to achieve a "just peace" in Ukraine. Turkey was the venue for negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian representatives in the spring of 2022, as well as earlier this year. However, they failed to end the conflict.
"I think (the meeting with Erdogan) will be enough for a substantive discussion", Zelensky said. "We have some positions and signals from the United States, we will see tomorrow", the Ukrainian president added, without giving further details.
Last month, the Kremlin accused Kiev of disrupting the Istanbul negotiation process for a possible peaceful resolution to the conflict.
"The process is on hold due to the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to answer in any way the questions we raised", Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television journalist Pavel Zarubin, quoted by DPA.
Delegations from Moscow and Kiev have met repeatedly since May this year for direct negotiations in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul. Several exchanges of prisoners of war and the bodies of killed servicemen have been agreed upon, but Russia refuses to withdraw its main claims, so a peace agreement is not in sight in the near future.