Ukrainian Foreign Minister: I considered hitting Lavrov at talks in Antalya

(Patria) - Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, in an interview published on Monday, said there were moments when he felt the need to "punch" his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in the face during talks in the early stages of Moscow's invasion, Reuters reported.

Kuleba's brief remarks were part of a one-hour informal interview with a Ukrainian video blogger that ranged from cooking to hobbies and Ukrainian football.

When asked, as part of a series of rapid-fire questions, about his toughest negotiations, Kuleba said:

"The toughest conversations are those where you simply feel like you want to go and punch your counterpart in the nose, but you really can't. And I can say that this happened two or three times. One occasion was with Lavrov in (the Turkish resort of) Antalya in the spring of 2022."

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met for several rounds of talks in the first weeks after the invasion in February 2022, first near Ukraine's border with Belarus, and later in Turkey.

Kuleba said at the time that the talks in Turkey were difficult and dealt with a ceasefire and the arrangement of humanitarian corridors. No agreement was reached in those talks, and there have been no negotiations since.

In Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Kuleba's latest statements underscored the incompetence of the Ukrainian leadership.

"And this is the problem: uneducated, aggressive people have been recruited under the guise of serving as ministers to destroy Ukraine with American money," Zakharova told the daily Izvestia.
"Perhaps his place is in bare-knuckle fighting, not the Foreign Ministry," she added.