Any world peace summit on Ukraine that excludes Russia is simply "absurd" and it will fail, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Tuesday and cited by Reuters.
Peskov also told the news outlet "Arguments and Facts" , that Russia continues its two-year war against Ukraine to protect itself from the West.
"Can the Ukrainian problem be solved without the participation of Russia? The answer is clear - it can't," said Peskov in the interview conducted last Thursday, the day before the mass shooting in a concert hall near Moscow.
"Because Ukraine has been turned into a tool in the hands of the collective West, with the help of which they intend, so they would like, to put more pressure on Russia, to restrain Russia and leave it on the periphery of development. And if they can, finish it," he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for an international peace summit, and earlier this year Switzerland said it would host the meeting and that a date and details were being discussed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already condemned as unenforceable the Ukrainian peace plan, which calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops and the restoration of Kiev's 1991 borders, including Crimea, seized and annexed by Russia in 2014.
Peskov reiterated that the plan was unthinkable and also condemned plans discussed by the European Union and other countries to take control of profits from Russian assets and transfer them to Ukraine.
"I believe that the Europeans understand that we will challenge such a decision. "This is probably not a matter of a year, but rather of decades," he said.