The presidential spokesman said the West was using equivocal language, which only escalated the conflict

The West is using the Ukrainian crisis to weaken Russia and isolate it from the world community, which only aggravates the conflict in Ukraine, Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the Argumenty I Fakty weekly published on Wednesday.

He said the West was seeking to topple Putin and used any pretext for that.
The presidential spokesman said the West was using equivocal language, which only escalated the conflict in Ukraine. “Russia is already doing all it can to stop this conflict: it is de facto helping the Ukrainian economy, ensuring coal and electricity supplies, etc. It sends numerous humanitarian convoys to people in southeast of Ukraine. We cannot leave these people to the mercy of fate,” he said, adding that the two peoples had always had relations of kinship. Thus, he noted, his father had been born in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region.
“But Russia cannot settle this Ukraine’s domestic conflict,” Peskov said. “Now, to put the problem in simple words, the West is seeking to hold Putin a party to the conflict, to isolate him in international politics, to have him step down, insisting, at the same time, that he must settle the crisis in a neighbouring country.”

“The war (in Ukraine) can be stopped only through an intra-Ukrainian dialogue,” Peskov stressed. “And such dialogue can be initiated only by official Kiev. The attempt to solve the crisis by the use of force is a road to nowhere. As long as Kiev doesn’t speak with its own regions, people will continue to be killed there.” “Germany, France, Russia, the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) can act as guarantors of settlement,” he noted.

“I am sure the West will never leave us alone,” he said. “Not because of Crimea or Ukraine. “If it weren’t for Crimea, they would have invented some other pretext.” The presidential spokesman reminded that the president had said in his annual state-of-the-nation address that as a sovereign, independent and strong state Russia must be part and parcel of the international community and the global economy. “Isolationism and self-isolationism would be wrong,” he added.

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