Putin meets with African leaders in Russia to discuss Ukraine peace plan, but no visible progress

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with a group of leaders of African countries who traveled to Russia on a self-styled “peace mission” the day after they went to Ukraine, but the meeting ended with no visible progress.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with a group of leaders of African countries who traveled to Russia on a self-styled “peace mission” the day after they went to Ukraine, but the meeting ended with no visible progress.

The seven African leaders - the presidents of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa and Zambia, as well as Egypt's prime minister and top envoys from the Republic of Congo and Uganda - visited Ukraine on Friday to try to help end the nearly 16-month-old war.

The African leaders then traveled to St. Petersburg on Saturday to meet with Putin who was attending Russia's showpiece international economic forum.

Details about the delegation's proposals were thin.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the three-hour meeting that the Africans' peace plan consisted of 10 elements, but “was not formulated on paper.”

“The peace initiative proposed by African countries is very difficult to implement, difficult to compare positions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. But ”President Putin has shown interest in considering it.”

“He spoke about our position. Not all provisions can be correlated with the main elements of our position, but this does not mean that we do not need to continue working,” Peskov said.