‘Not interested!’ Russia Dismisses Land Swap Deal with Ukraine

OwelekeTV — Russia on Wednesday rejected swapping occupied territory with Kyiv as part of any future peace deal hours after launching a barrage of drones and missiles on Kyiv that killed one person.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had floated the idea of exchanging occupied land, said the latest strikes showed the Kremlin was not interested in pursuing peace in Ukraine.

Zelensky had suggested exchanging Ukrainian-held chunks of Russia’s region of Kursk for Russian-controlled territory in eastern and southern Ukraine in an interview published late Tuesday. The Kremlin dismissed the proposal outright in response.

“This is impossible,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “Russia has never and will never discuss the topic of exchanging its territory.”

Peskov vowed that Ukrainian forces holding territory inside Russia would either be “destroyed” or pushed out.

Ukrainian forces rushed over the Russian border in August last year to wrest control over swathes of territory it hopes will be key to any future deal to end the grinding conflict.

Combined missile strike

The Kremlin’s refusal to discuss land swaps came shortly after Zelensky announced that one person had been killed and at least four others were wounded — including a child — in the attack on Kyiv. It damaged apartment blocks, office buildings, and civilian infrastructure.

AFP journalists heard a volley of explosions ring out over the city and saw the body of one person killed covered in a black plastic sheet on a street littered with debris.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not preparing for peace — he continues to kill Ukrainians and destroy cities,” Zelensky wrote on social media after the attack.

“Only strong steps and pressure on Russia can stop this terror. Right now we need the unity and the support of all our partners in the fight for a just end to this war,”

he added.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out a “group missile strike” on Ukrainian military-industrial sites that produce drones, and claimed all targets had been hit.

Zelensky’s comments on Russia’s readiness for talks come on the back of weeks of mounting rhetoric from Moscow, Washington, and Kyiv over the possibility of negotiations that could end the nearly three-year Russian invasion.

Zelensky is due to meet US Vice President JD Vance on Friday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. That gathering will be dominated by the war, which has cost tens of thousands of lives.

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Keith Kellogg, who is tasked with drawing up a proposal to halt the fighting, is also due to visit Ukraine next week, after the Zelensky-Vance meeting in Munich.

That trip would come just days before the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion on February 24.