Peace initiatives from countries supplying arms to the Kiev regime are a manipulation, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Sputnik, commenting on the Swiss Foreign Ministry's reaction to Russian-Swiss talks at the UN.
"Either stop supplying arms and inciting conflict, and then your conversations about peace plans, initiatives and processes can somehow be identified as sincere, at least, or obviously not false. Or, if all this bacchanalia continues while using the Kiev regime to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, then what peace initiatives or efforts are you even talking about?" Zakharova said.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed at a meeting with his Swiss counterpart Ignazio Cassis on the sidelines of the UN Security Council's open debate that Moscow takes into account Bern's departure from the principles of neutrality and its support for Kiev when building bilateral relations.
Switzerland is not a member of the EU or NATO, but Bern has joined almost all European sanctions against Russia, and has blocked $8.8 billion worth of private Russian assets as part of the sanctions. The Swiss banking giant, Credit Suisse, has blocked or frozen more than a third of Russian assets registered in Switzerland, that is, 17.6 billion Swiss francs (over $19.7 billion). The Swiss government also said that about 7.4 billion Swiss francs (about $8.45 billion) of Russian Central Bank assets have been blocked in the country and that Bern is ready to participate in international discussions on the confiscation of frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank and the Russian state.
Moscow has repeatedly stated that it is ready for negotiations, but Kiev has legislated a ban on them. The West has urged Russia to negotiate, which Moscow has shown it is ready to do, but at the same time the West ignores Kiev's constant refusal to talk. Earlier, the Kremlin said that there are no conditions for the situation in Ukraine to move in a peaceful direction now, while the absolute priority for Russia is to achieve the goals of the special operation and at the moment, this is possible only by military means. The Kremlin said the situation in Ukraine could move towards a peaceful course if the de facto situation and new realities are taken into account, adding that all of Moscow's demands are well known.