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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Russia would
never renounce its claims to four Ukrainian regions that Moscow
declared it had annexed last year following referendums that
Kyiv and the West slammed as bogus and illegal.
"There are certain realities that have already become an
internal factor. I mean the new territories. The constitution of
the Russian Federation exists, and cannot be ignored. Russia
will never be able to compromise on this, these are important
realities," Peskov said on Tuesday.
Russia proclaimed it had annexed the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson
and Zaporizhzhia regions last September in a grand ceremony in
Moscow.
The regions were subsequently named as constituent subjects of
the Russian Federation in a constitutional decree.
Peskov said Russia was open to negotiations if Kyiv accepted
Moscow's control over the regions.
"With a favourable state of affairs and the appropriate attitude
from the Ukrainians, this can be resolved at the negotiating
table. But the main thing is to achieve our goals," he said.
Russian forces do not fully control any of the four regions, and
Moscow says it is fighting to "liberate" them from the control
of Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
Kyiv and the West say this is a baseless pretext for an illegal
land-grab.
Ukraine says Russian troops must leave every inch of its
territory including the four annexed regions and the Crimean
peninsula, which Moscow unilaterally annexed from Ukraine in
2014, before a peace plan can be discussed.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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