Turkey has said Russia and Ukraine made progress on their negotiations to halt the war and the two sides were \u201cclose to an agreement\u201d.<\/p>\n
Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24 with President Vladimir Putin calling his country\u2019s actions a \u201cspecial operation\u201d meant to demilitarise Ukraine and purge it of what he sees as dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an aggressive war of choice.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, it is not an easy thing to come to terms with while the war is going on, while civilians are killed, but we would like to say that momentum is still gained,\u201d foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in live comments from the southern Turkish province of Antalya on Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see that the parties are close to an agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cavusoglu said Turkey was in contact with the negotiating teams from the two countries but he refused to divulge the details of the talks as \u201cwe play an honest mediator and facilitator role.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an interview with daily newspaper Hurriyet, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the sides were negotiating six points: Ukraine\u2019s neutrality, disarmament and security guarantees, the so-called \u201cde-Nazification\u201d, removal of obstacles on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine, the status of the breakaway republics in the Donbas region and the status of Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014.<\/p>\n
Ukraine and the West have dismissed Russian references to \u201cneo-Nazis\u201d in Ukraine\u2019s democratically-elected leadership as baseless propaganda.<\/p>\n
Foreign ministers Sergei Lavrov of Russia and Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine met in the Turkish resort town of Antalya earlier this month with Cavusoglu also attending. The discussions did not yield concrete results.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly appealed for peace, urging Russia to accept \u201cmeaningful\u201d talks for an end to the invasion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the time to meet, to talk, time for renewing territorial integrity and fairness for Ukraine,\u201d he said, in a video posted on social media on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Source: Al Jazeera<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Turkey has said Russia and Ukraine made progress on their negotiations to halt the war and the two sides were \u201cclose to an agreement\u201d. Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24 with President Vladimir Putin calling his country\u2019s actions a \u201cspecial operation\u201d meant to demilitarise Ukraine and purge it of what he sees as dangerous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":93174,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-world-news"],"yoast_head":"\n