More than one meeting with Putin would not be enough: Zelensky
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Zelensky wants to sit down and talk with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, more than once, saying that one time would not be enough to reach an agreement.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the presidential office in Kiev, Ukraine
A single meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be enough for Moscow and Kiev to reach an agreement regarding the situation in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.
"I do not think that it will take just one meeting. I do not think you can meet just once and agree on everything because there are a lot of issues," Zelensky told Ukrainian media. He also said the issues between Russia and Crimea were still up for debate.
Donbass has been subject to heavy bombardment from the Ukrainian side for nearly the past decade, but on March 7, a senior DPR military official said Russian and DPR forces surrounded the city and had begun cleaning it from Ukrainian troops, among whom are the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Mariupol is situated on the coast of the Donetsk People's Republic of the Donbass region. It has a population of 450,000, and Ukrainian troops took over it in 2014 following the Crimea crisis when Kiev sent its forces into the region, and the Russian armed forces have announced that they have cleared the city's urban area of Ukrainian troops.
Ukraine's Zelensky had announced last month that he was ready for negotiations with Russia, more than two weeks after the war broke out in his country.
Negotiations had taken place before then in Belarus, though no milestones were reached between the two parties.
Negotiations also took place in Turkey, and they reached some compromisations, but nothing was set in stone.
All in all, the negotiations saw Russia and Ukraine agree on expanding the number of humanitarian corridors to help civilians escape from war-torn regions, which Moscow pushed for since the start of the war.
