Ukraine will not be 'chopped up' for a peace deal, Zelenskyy's advisor tells LBC

10 March 2022, 18:45 | Updated: 10 March 2022, 19:53

An advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine will not be carved up in order to appease Putin.

As the latest round of peace talks fail in Turkey, Alexander Rodnyasky, said the country will not sacrifice the Donetsk and Luhanskthe in order to strike a peace deal with Russia.

Appearing on Tonight with Andrew Marr, mr Rodnyasky said "the pressure is on the Russian side" when it comes to conflict in Ukraine.

During the show on Thursday evening, LBC's Andrew Marr asked: "If president Zelenskyy is willing and prepared to put the whole NATO issue to one side, as that appears to be the case.

"And the Russians have effectively taken those two oblasts in the east, the Russian speaking bits, then surely the bones of a deal are already obvious?"

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'We don't see any evidence of these peace talks yielding any results so far'

To which Mr Rodnyasky replied: "I wouldn’t go to far at this stage, certainly we are not giving up on our NATO ambitions in the long run, we are willing to discuss any potential security deal that is actually tangible and credible.

"As a posed to the Budapest memorandum which just yielded nothing.

"But there is not going to be any chopping up of Ukraine. We are not willing to compromise on that."

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When asked by Andrew Marr, whether Ukraine would ever "be prepared to loose those territories", the Ukrainian advisor said: "Of course not, and if you ask the people who live there they're not willing to be part of any other country either."

The Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge said hope still remains that Ukraine will win the war as "the pressure is on the Russian side".

He explained: "We know that the threat is serious, we know what the Russians are capable of but the pressure is on them.

"They are running out of resources, moral is low on their side and this is our country so it is not guaranteed at all that they will win, if anything they are loosing."

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The advisor is currently on a sabbatical from Cambridge University and said he plans to return to the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, to "be with his people" and help the president through the conflict.

Peace talks that took place in Turkey on Thursday afternoon failed after Sergei Lavrov branded an attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol a "pathetic outcry".

The Russian Foreign Minister claimed during his meeting with Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba that Russia "did not attack Ukraine" insisting instead that troops were carrying out "special operations" in the region.

Speaking after the the "difficult" meeting, Lavrorv said: "We are not planning to attack other countries. We didn't attack Ukraine, either."

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When asked about the air strike during the press conference, Putin's confidant replied: "It is not the first time we see pathetic outcries concerning the so-called atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military."

He went on to claim that the hospital had been taken over by the Azov battalion - a volunteer group fighting alongside the Ukrainian army- and prior to the attack all the "mothers and nurses were chased out" of the hospital.

Following the meeting Dmytro Kuleba said: "I want to repeat that Ukraine has not surrendered, does not surrender, and will not surrender."