NATO Secretary General: Peace talks in Istanbul are not serious

The Ukrainian-Russian peace talks in Istanbul are "not a serious matter" due to Moscow's position, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said. The official made the remarks on the sidelines of the Alliance summit, a LIGA.net correspondent from The Hague reports.

According to Rutte, NATO partners must be confident that Ukraine has everything to continue the fight and is in the strongest possible position when real peace talks begin.

"I'm not talking about these negotiations that this Russian historian [Vladimir Medinsky] is currently conducting, going back to [events] a thousand years ago, and who was responsible for what back then," the NATO Secretary General noted.

In his opinion, the two meetings in Istanbul were "a frivolous affair."

At the same time, Rutte noted that he was "very proud" of the Ukrainians when they sent a high-level team to these negotiations: "So they took it seriously. But it's clear that Russia was not serious."

However, the official hopes that real negotiations "will begin in the near future."

• The NATO Secretary General also stated that US President Trump has moved the issue of ending the war in Ukraine from a dead end by starting a dialogue with dictator Putin.
• The only real achievement of the Istanbul meetings was the large-scale exchange of prisoners and casualties between Kyiv and Moscow, but the latter tried to sabotage this process as well.