Peskov says Zelensky personally refuses to start peace process
Kremlin says Kyiv violated the energy truce announced by Donald Trump and continued strikes hit Russian refineries.
The Kremlin’s spokesman accused Kyiv of violating an energy-focused ceasefire announced over the weekend by U.S. President Donald Trump, and said that Ukrainian forces kept striking Russian refineries despite the declaration.
Dmitry Peskov, speaking in Moscow, also said that both Kyiv and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally refuse to launch a political peace process.
Russian rebuttal to European criticism
Peskov rejected criticism from European governments about the export deal on Russian oil that Moscow and Washington reached, arguing that many European states were behaving as if they were on the side of a belligerent rather than praising the agreement.
“We continue to see the destructive stance of European states. Instead of welcoming this agreement, they subjected it—especially President Trump and the decisions of American negotiators—to rather harsh criticism. Lately, Europe has indeed consistently behaved as a belligerent party,” Peskov said.
President Trump announced the ceasefire via his social media channels on Sunday but did not provide operational details of the pause in hostilities.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, initially welcomed the announcement as good news but insisted that Russia continued to strike Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Those strikes, Ukrainian authorities said, left some 600,000 people without electricity yesterday.
Photo: press material from the event
