Peskov Says European Countries Are Acting Contradictorily

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said European countries were expressing a willingness to achieve peace while also saying they would deploy military forces in Ukraine. According to Sina Finance, citing China Media Group, Peskov said deploying European armed forces in Ukraine would mean the war continued on a larger scale. He also said Russia had received assurances that NATO would not expand eastward, but NATO had since expanded five or six times, making written guarantees on the issue necessary. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on the 12th, during a meeting with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the U.S. president’s son-in-law, that Russia had never closed the door to dialogue with Europe and that Europe had ended the dialogue on its own initiative. Putin also said U.S. President Donald Trump had proposed an agreement to establish a new security system in Europe, but Brussels had rejected it.