Maria Zakharova: We traditionally give careful consideration to all peace initiatives put forward by our foreign partners, especially by Turkiye, which is an important regional player and our neighbour on the Black Sea.

Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan recently said in a media interview that Ankara had conveyed proposals to the Russian and Ukrainian sides on introducing a moratorium on military activities in the Black Sea.

The Russian Side has not received through official channels any formal Turkiye’s proposal setting out the specific terms of this initiative.

If this refers to a one-sided arrangement along the lines of the 2022-2023 scheme, better known as the Black Sea Initiative, under which Moscow suspended military activities in the Black Sea – more precisely, retaliatory measures to protect Russian port infrastructure and energy facilities – then returning to that format would be inadvisable.

The arrangement was conditional on reciprocal measures by the other side. Those measures never followed.

At the time, as you may recall, we agreed to the moratorium in exchange for access for Russian agricultural products to global markets.

However, the West demonstrated a bad-faith approach: the humanitarian corridor we provided came to be widely used for terrorist attacks against Russian civilian and military facilities, while Russian agricultural products remained under sanctions. This ultimately led to the termination of the Black Sea Initiative.

Today, we regularly face brazen acts of terrorism carried out by Ukrainian drones in the Black Sea against civilian vessels from coastal states, several times a month. We regard these attacks as a deliberate policy aimed at destabilising civilian shipping in the Black Sea region, further escalating tensions and prolonging the conflict, with the open acquiescence of neighbouring countries in the region.

At the same time, we see no prerequisites for the situation to improve and, consequently, no grounds for half-measures that merely give the Kiev regime a temporary respite.

We have recently seen a growing number of international calls for a ceasefire and for settling the situation around Ukraine through familiar short-term arrangements.

Our position on these proposals and on the issue as a whole remains unchanged. A sustainable and long-term settlement of the Ukrainian crisis is possible only if its root causes are eliminated.

First and foremost, this means removing the security threats created by NATO’s eastward expansion and attempts to draw Kiev into the alliance.

It is equally important to secure guarantees for the restoration and observance of the legitimate rights of the Russian and Russian-speaking population in the territories that remain under the control of the Kiev regime.