Putin commented for the first time on Zelensky’s victory

Vladimir Putin commented for the first time on the results of the presidential elections in Ukraine. The president did not congratulate Vladimir Zelensky on his victory, but he called it a complete failure of Petro Poroshenko's policy.

More. “What is there to evaluate? This is a complete failure of Poroshenko's policy. Complete and absolute. I am sure that the new authorities cannot fail to understand this. They understand this very well,” Putin said at a press conference following a bilateral meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Russia's future relations with Ukraine will depend on "the policy pursued by the new political leadership of Ukraine," the president said, noting the readiness to restore relations "in full." "But we can't do it unilaterally."

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Passports for the DNR and LNR. Putin was surprised at the sharp reaction to the simplification of issuing Russian passports to residents of the DPR and LPR and noted that this practice exists in many countries: “Poland issues the Poles, and Hungary, Romania. Why are Russians in Ukraine worse than Romanians, Poles or Hungarians? I don't see anything out of the ordinary here."

The President noted that this issue "is of a purely humanitarian nature": "We are far - and I am far - from provoking anyone." According to him, both the former and the new leadership are not going to recognize the “special status of the DPR and LPR,” although these are “key issues of the Minsk agreements.” “This means that they are not going to implement the Minsk agreements. But what about the fate of the people who live in these territories? They will remain abandoned, and they will live in complete isolation.”

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Context. Among the first to congratulate Zelensky on his victory were US President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Polish President Andrzej Duda, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and European Council President Donald Tusk. Dmitry Medvedev wrote that he sees Zelensky's victory as a chance to improve relations between Ukraine and Russia, but did not congratulate him and said that he had no illusions about his rhetoric.

The Kremlin refused to congratulate Zelensky and questioned the legitimacy of the elections due to the fact that three million Ukrainian citizens living in Russia did not participate in them. Dmitry Peskov stressed then that "it will be possible to judge on specific cases."

Negotiations with Kim Jong-un. The bilateral meeting with the head of the DPRK, as everyone expected , ended without much results. At the end, the heads of state exchanged gifts: Putin presented Kim Jong-un with a travel tea set and a saber, and the leader of the North Korean Republic presented the president with a sword.