Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to skip peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Istanbul this week, James Gilmore, former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told Newsmax on Friday that he doesn’t believe there’s “any interest on the Russian side of actually striking any kind of deal that’s suitable.”

“First of all, just about the meeting itself, this is a meeting that actually Putin proposed and Zelenskyy said, ‘Fine, I’ll be happy to meet with you across the table, man-to-man, and we’ll do this.’ But Putin didn’t want to meet with Zelenskyy,” Gilmore said on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “A war criminal doesn’t want to sit across the table from the leader of an independent state and that’s what Zelenskyy is. So when Putin decided he wasn’t actually going to go, that’s no surprise to me. But, naturally, Zelenskyy would have been there. In fact, I think he set out to be there.

“This is a meeting that should have occurred, but, at the end of the day, let’s look and see what’s really going on here,” he continued. “And what’s really going on is that Putin has a game plan. He’s [been] executing it now for years and that plan is the complete subjugation of Ukraine and putting it back into the Russian Empire, and then using that as a stepping stone to reassemble the old Russian Empire.

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