Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has rejected US envoy Steve Witkoff’s comparison of the crises
Israel’s “unprovoked” attack on Iran bears no comparison to the Ukraine conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, rejecting an assessment made by the US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.
Witkoff had suggested earlier that the recent ceasefire between Iran and Israel could serve as a model for ending the hostilities between Russia and Ukraine.
“We’re hopeful that people look at what happened in Iran and say: ‘we want a part of that sort of peace process as well,’” Witkoff told CNBC on Wednesday. “This may well gravitate towards Russia and Ukraine.”
Peskov firmly rejected the comparison, saying the two conflicts differ “in their essence and nature.”
“The Israeli attacks on Iran were absolutely unprovoked,” he stated. In contrast, the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine had roots “going back several decades,” Peskov noted, citing NATO’s expansion toward Russian borders and its support for an “armed coup” in Kiev in 2014.
“It is hardly appropriate to draw parallels here,” the Kremlin spokesman added, describing the notion of “peace by force” as irrelevant to the Ukraine context. He argued that pressuring Russia into a ceasefire with Ukraine would be ineffective.
Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13, claiming that Tehran was close to being able to build a nuclear weapon – an assertion disputed by both the International Atomic Energy Agency and US intelligence. The US joined the offensive, hitting Iranian nuclear sites, prompting Iran to retaliate with a missile strike on a US base in Qatar. A ceasefire was reached on Tuesday, reportedly on the initiative of US President Donald Trump.
The Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022 after Kiev increased its shelling of civilians in the Donbass region in violation of the Minsk agreements, according to Moscow. Russia has also cited NATO’s military presence in Ukraine and Kiev’s ambitions to join the military bloc as key reasons for its military action, accusing Western countries of exacerbating the crisis by supplying arms to Kiev.
Negotiations between Moscow and Kiev resumed in May after a nearly three-year hiatus. The two parties agreed to exchange prisoners and the remains of fallen soldiers. Draft peace proposals were exchanged earlier this month, but Peskov said discussions on those documents would not begin until the current humanitarian agreements are fulfilled.
