Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, has reiterated the country’s conditions for ending the war in Ukraine.

Russian state news agency TASS quoted Mr Naryshkin as saying Ukraine must renounce its ambitions to join NATO and give up territories annexed by Moscow if the Ukraine war was to end.

“The conditions of the peace agreement naturally include a nuclear-free, neutral status for Ukraine, the demilitarisation and denasification of the Ukrainian state, and the abolition of all discriminatory laws passed after the 2014 coup,’’ Mr Naryshkin said, referring to the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in the wake of pro-Western protests.

Mr Naryshkin said a peace deal must also include “recognition of the sovereignty and territorial borders of the Russian Federation – the current territorial borders.’’

Following Russia’s annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014, Russia also illegally annexed the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022.

However, Russia did not fully control any of the territories except Crimea.

Mr Naryshkin praised the fact that dialogue between Russia and the U.S. on a potential end to the war has been resumed.

Speaking during a visit to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, Mr Naryshkin said  Russia and Belarus, which also shared a border with Poland, were seeing an increase in NATO activities on their borders.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia and the U.S. were working hard on a peaceful solution for Ukraine but accused Europe of being interested in continuing the war by supplying weapons to Ukraine. However, the EU and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy have rejected this postulation and emphasised that they are striving for peace through strength.

(dpa/NAN)