After the meeting he held in Moscow with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that negotiations with Ukraine will continue and he hopes that the talks will yield a positive result.
"Talks continue, they are held online, we hope there will be positive results. "Without an agreement on Crimea and Donbas, it is not possible to sign guarantees on Ukraine's security," he said after meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The Russian president said the recent talks in Istanbul had made "progress", but said they had broken down following reports of massacres of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha. He claimed that they were a "provocation" and added that "the Russian army had nothing to do with it".
"We know who staged the provocation in Bucha. "The Russian military has nothing to do with what happened."
Referring to the current situation in Mariupol, which he described as "complicated and tragic", Putin added that Russian military operations were no longer taking place in the besieged city.