Putin met in Paris for the first time Ukraine’s relatively new president, Volodymyr Zelenskij.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, says he is satisfied with the progress of a summit in Paris on peace in Ukraine on Monday.
“Yes, I’m happy,” he says in English on a video, which is posted on Twitter.
Putin met in Paris for the first time Ukraine’s relatively new president, Volodymyr Zelenskij, in a new attempt to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
It writes the Russian news agency Tass.
At the summit had both Putin and Zelenskij first separate bilateral meetings with both the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.
There was not wait any comprehensive new agreement on peace at the meeting, where the French and the German leader acted as brokers. But diplomats had hoped that there would be steps taken towards more confidence and a basis for a continued peace process.
There was awaited a news conference later Monday after a dinner in the Elysée Palace.
the Kremlin had previously sent out signals that it was ready to negotiate with Zelenskij, as the russians have called “sympathetic” and “serious”.
Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said to the newspaper Funke, Germany and France to do everything possible to get boosted in a Ukrainian peace process. He refers to the conflict as an inflamed and dangerous wounds on Europe.
Zelenskij and Putin arrived separately at the Elysée Palace, where the summit took place within the framework of the so-called Normandy Format. The previous meeting in this context was way back in 2016.
the Negotiations are based on a peace plan at a meeting in Minsk in 2015.
Since Russia in the 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, has the relationship between Russia and Ukraine has been very tense.
But the Ukrainian relatively newly elected president, who is a former comedian, said at his inauguration after being elected in may, that he would focus on the dispute in the east, where around 13,000 people have lost their lives.
the Conflict escalated in 2013, when Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovich, postponed the signing of a long-awaited trade and association agreement with the EU.
the Agreement would in practice mean a more pro-western Ukraine, which would thus also mean a greater distance to Russia.
the Postponement caused great anger in the country’s capital, Kyiv, where thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in the winter of 2013 to 2014.
It ended in several deaths of demonstrators before the parliament in the February overthrow of Yanukovych. The situation led to the separatist løsrivelser in eastern Ukraine. Russia is accused by Ukraine and the West to support the prorussiske separatists in Østukraine with weapons and other supplies.
Later in the year in 2014 beleaguered Russian troops into the Crimean peninsula and annexed the area, located in southern Ukraine. /ritzau/AFP
