Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Maria ZakharovaMOSCOW, Mar 14Until recently, Russia offered to resolve the crisis in Ukraine through negotiations, but the United States and France refused, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. to negotiations. The United States and France refused. The United States, as the main one, so to speak, «on the skeet» regarding Ukraine and global security issues in the dialogue with Russia, and France as a mediator. They refused, it was their initiative, they we did it ourselves,» she said on the air of «Russia 1» in the program «Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov.» Therefore, now in the West they cannot «shout» that not all options have been exhausted or this is «aggression from scratch,» Zakharova added . “We talked many times and everyone laughed: whoever doesn’t want to talk to (Russian Foreign Minister Sergey) Lavrov will talk to (Russian Defense Minister Sergey) Shoigu. Did something not come true? They sat for hours, talked for hours, appealed to reason, conscience,» she summed up. For the first time, the already popular expression about Shoigu and Lavrov was used in an interview with RIA Novosti in 2018 by the director of the Department for Nonproliferation and Arms Control of the Russian Foreign Ministry Vladimir Ermakov. So he answered the question about Moscow's possible reaction in the event of the final withdrawal of the United States from the INF Treaty. Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces only strike at military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops, but not at the civilian population. With the support of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the DPR and LPR groups are developing an offensive. But the occupation of Ukraine is out of the question, the President of Russia stressed.
