Putin says loss of trust in West will make future Ukraine talks harder

President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia’s near-total loss of trust in the West would make an eventual settlement over Ukraine much harder to
reach, although contacts between Russian and U.S. intelligence services were at least continuing.
Since suffering a series of battlefield reverses, Putin has increasingly cast his more than nine-month-old invasion of Ukraine as a fight to defend Russia against an aggressive “collective West”.
At a news conference in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, Putin bemoaned the failure to implement the Minsk agreements – ceasefire and constitutional reform deals between Kyiv and Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine brokered in 2014 and 2015 by Russia, France and Germany, at the outset of
the conflict with Ukraine.
“We thought we would still be able to agree within the framework of the Minsk peace agreements. What can you say? There is a question of trust,” Putin said. “And trust, of course, is almost at zero.”