Moscow hopes of ending Ukraine war in ‘foreseeable future’

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Moscow is hoping that the special military operation in Ukraine could be ended in the foreseeable future, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

He commented on his interview to the British television channel Sky News where he earlier said that Russia was hoping that “the operation will reach its goals or end in talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegation in the next few days, in the foreseeable future”.

When asked on Friday whether it could indeed be a matter of days, Peskov said, “We are talking about the foreseeable future”.

Speaking about the grounds for making these forecasts, Peskov said, “The operation continues and the goals are being achieved”.

“Substantive work is being carried out both on the military side, in terms of advancing the operation, and on the side of the negotiators who are in the negotiation process with their Ukrainian counterparts”, he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24 announced a special military operation in response to a request for help by the heads of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories, but aims to demilitarize and de-Nazify the country.

Meanwhile a source told this correspondent that Russia’s special operations in Ukraine may end on or before May 9.

Russian forces don’t use Tochka-U missiles, says Kremlin

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday referred reporters to the Defense Ministry statement about the strike at Kramatorsk with a Tochka-U missile and said Russian forces don’t use these missiles.

“We need to go by the statement of the [Russian] Defense Ministry, first of all, which ruled out that our armed forces utilized that missile. Our armed forces don’t use this type of missiles, and also no missions took place or were planned for today in Kramatorsk”.

He said he was confident that “this is the statement we need to go by”.

Russia’s Defense Ministry earlier rejected Kiev’s statement of a missile strike allegedly performed by Russian troops on the Kramatorsk railway station on April 8.

“All the claims by representatives of the Kiev nationalist regime that Russia allegedly carried out a ‘missile attack’ on April 8 against the railway terminal in Kramatorsk are a provocation and have absolutely nothing to do with reality”, the ministry stated.

“The Russian armed forces had no fire tasks and planned none in the town of Kramatorsk on April 8”.

The Tochka-U tactical missile whose fragments were found and the relevant footage was posted by eye-witnesses, is used only by the Ukrainian army, the ministry said.

“On March 14, 2022, a battalion of the Ukrainian army’s 19th separate missile brigade delivered a strike by a similar Tochka-U missile against the center of Donetsk, in which 17 people were killed and another 36 civilians were wounded”, the ministry said.

Spokesman for the People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Eduard Basurin said earlier on Friday that about 30 people were killed after a Tochka-U missile hit the railway station in Kramatorsk.

The Tochka-U is an upgraded version of the Soviet Tochka precision tactical missile system designated to strike selective small-size targets deep in the enemy defense. It is made up of a one-stage missile guided along its entire flight path and operational at a range of 15 km to 120 km.

The Russian Army has not used Tochka-U missiles since late 2019 when the last missile and artillery unit was rearmed with Iskander tactical missile systems. According to various data, the Ukrainian military currently operates from 38 to 90 Tochka-U systems and several hundred missiles.

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