Russia has consistently sought negotiation. It came to us in December seeking to prevent this war. All the Russians wanted was a guarantee of Ukraine wouldn't join NATO and be neutral and Minsk Agreement, which Ukraine signed, implemented.
Russia and Ukraine almost came to an agreement in March in Turkey before we and Boris Johnson killed the deal.
Russia will be happy to leave what's left of Ukraine so long as Ukraine agrees to remain neutral and leave Russian territory alone. But, the annexed areas are going to remain part of Russia. And, that is what the people in those regions want.
You, Blinken and neocons lie like they breath.
Non-sense Comrade Kazan.
Comrade Putin made his intentions perfectly clear in his February 22, 2022 address:
Address by the President of the Russian Federation
The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.
It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force.
So how'd that work out, Comrade Kazan?
https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en
Those terms, eh? This is the direct link to the verbatim draft agreement offered by The Kremlin. No Propaganda, no middle men, no edits. Just the facts.
Russia’s terms in summary... Roll back NATO to status quo ante per 1997 (meaning what - expel members that have done nothing wrong and don’t have weapons that threaten Russia and have done nothing that threatens Russia?), terminate all accessions in progress (eg Bosnia?), remove all defensive capabilities from all of eastern Europe, stop doing training in eastern Europe, stop doing military exercises anywhere Russia decides it doesn’t like...
Open ended demands.
The quid pro quo? None. No meaningful concessions from Russia. It can do exercises anywhere. It can invade any country if it’s “necessary”.
The whole thing is a manifesto for “leave eastern Europe defenceless and do nothing when we invade it.”
Unacceptable.
Even one of their own diplomats in March/April was so gobsmacked at the insanity of such obviously unacceptable demands he quit his job and fled Russia. He now lives in Israel.
He has said the terms came directly from the Kremlin and as such are utterly beyond criticism. They presented terms that they all knew would be rejected because they were so outrageous.
Look, when even the Russian negotiating team itself can’t defend the terms they had to present, when they say if they’d been on NATO side of the table they wouldn’t have accepted those terms either, Russia must’ve known those terms were unacceptable to NATO.