Ukraine\u2019s denial of an attack on Vladimir Putin\u2019s residence lacks credibility, Kanwal Sibal has said<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s Vladimir Zelensky is \u201cdefying\u201d peace efforts by Russia and the United States with actions like this week\u2019s attempted drone strike on Vladimir Putin\u2019s Novgorod residence, former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal told RT in an interview on Tuesday.
\nKiev launched 91 long-range drones in the attack on the night of December 28-29. All the UAVs were intercepted and there were no casualties or material damage involved.
\nSibal said he has been observing statements made by Zelensky while the US-mediated peace process has been going on.
\n\u201cHe is sticking to his fundamental positions and I don\u2019t see much give in those positions and I\u2019m a bit surprised that he is defying President [Donald] Trump, not even now but even previously in terms of what he\u2019s been saying, encouraged by the Europeans to maintain a very hard line,\u201d Sibal said.
\nThe retired Indian diplomat said Zelensky is becoming bolder, thinking that he can deal with President Trump\u2019s idea of a peace settlement that will require him to make certain concessions.
\n\u201cHe thinks he can get away with this because he is being backed very strongly by the Europeans and I think he is very calculating that President Trump himself may be upset with what is happening, but he is also under pressure that he cannot totally abandon Ukraine because there are people in the United States who continue to be very anti-Russian, and would like the conflict to continue and the bleeding of Russia to continue,\u201d Sibal said.
\nThe former Indian foreign secretary also said that Ukraine\u2019s claims that no attack took place on Putin\u2019s home lack credibility. \u201cThe president of the United States, with all the intelligence briefings that he gets, would not talk about this the way he did, unless… this did take place,\u201d Sibal said.
\nTrump told reporters on Monday that he was \u201cvery angry\u201d about the attack. \u201cIt\u2019s a delicate period of time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not the right time. It\u2019s one thing to be offensive, because they\u2019re offensive. It\u2019s another thing to attack his house. It\u2019s not the right time to do any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ukraine\u2019s denial of an attack on Vladimir Putin\u2019s residence lacks credibility, Kanwal Sibal has said Ukraine\u2019s Vladimir Zelensky is \u201cdefying\u201d peace efforts by Russia and the United States with actions…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-environment","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mongolianews.mn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}