There’ll be peace in Ukraine within a year: Putin envoy
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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev has told an investment conference in Saudi Arabia that the war in Ukraine will stop within one year from now.
Dmitriev spoke after his meetings with officials from US President Donald Trump’s administration in the United States last weekend.
His visit followed an announcement that a summit between Trump and Putin had been postponed.
“We are sure that we are on the road to peace and as peacemakers we need to make it happen,” Dmitriev, who is also the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, told the audience in Saudi capital Riyadh.
Asked whether peace in Ukraine was possible within one year, Dmitriev said: “I believe so.”
While in the US, Dmitriev said that Russia and the US were close to a “diplomatic solution” on the war.
Dmitriev touted co-operation between the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s top holders of natural resources and said such co-operation will make the world more secure.
“People are right now focused on the regional conflict that exists around Russia but we do not want it to escalate into a bigger conflict. And for that we have to do better than we have been doing, not worse,” Dmitriev said.
Ukraine targeted Russian energy infrastructure with drones, disrupting air traffic across the country and sending several drones towards Moscow for the third straight night, Russian authorities said on Wednesday.
Ukraine’s General Staff said on the Telegram messaging app that its forces had struck Russia’s Mariysky refinery in the Mari El region, another in the village of Novospasskoye in the Ulyanovsk region and a gas plant in the town of Budyonnovsk in the southern Stavropol region.
Russian air defence units destroyed a total of 100 Ukrainian drones overnight, including six over the Moscow region, and the rest over 11 regions and the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram.
Ukraine has kept up long-range drone strikes on Moscow and other Russian regions in recent months, saying the aim is to hit energy, military and industrial assets, sap Russia’s war economy and show Russians the conflict is no longer distant.
A storage container containing fuel and lubricants in the city of Simferopol in Russian-annexed Crimea was hit by a Ukrainian drone and caught fire, the Russian-installed governor said on Telegram.
Reuters
