Ukraine peace talks without Russia will fail, Kremlin spokesman says

Any global peace summit on Ukraine that excludes Russia is simply “absurd” and will fail, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Tuesday.
Peskov said that Russia was pursuing its two-year-old war on Ukraine to protect itself from the West.
“Can the Ukrainian problem be resolved without Russia’s participation? The reply is clear – it cannot,” Peskov said in the interview conducted last Thursday, a day before the mass shooting at a concert hall outside Moscow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called for an international peace summit, and earlier this year Switzerland said it would host the meeting, and that a date and the details were being discussed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already denounced as unworkable a Ukrainian peace plan calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops and the restoration of Kyiv’s 1991 borders, including Crimea, seized and annexed by Russia in 2014.