“The meeting is expected to begin tomorrow afternoon and last until evening. Ankara’s mediation on Ukraine will be the top item on the agenda,” the source said. Erdogan will brief his ministers on the talks he held with NATO allies on the sidelines of the extraordinary summit in Brussels on March 24.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will host an hours-long cabinet meeting on Monday to discuss ways to advance peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, a source familiar with the matter told Sputnik. Erdogan spoke by phone on Sunday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They agreed that the next round of talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators would be held in Istanbul.

“The meeting is expected to begin tomorrow afternoon and last until evening. Ankara’s mediation on Ukraine will be the top item on the agenda,” the source said. Erdogan will brief his ministers on the talks he held with NATO allies on the sidelines of the extraordinary summit in Brussels on March 24.

“The president will brief his team on his contacts to get the ministers’ feedback. They will exchange opinions about naval mines that drifted into the Turkish territorial waters,” the source added.

‘NATO not aiming for regime change in Russia’

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that NATO does not have a goal of implementing a “regime change” in Russia. “This is not the objective of NATO, nor that of the US president”, Scholz said in an interview with the German ARD broadcaster, adding that he had discussed the issue with US President Joe Biden at the White House and both of the leaders agreed that a “regime change” in Russia is not a NATO policy goal.

Scholz added that Germany supports the spread of democracy but believes that it is up to the people and nations to fight for it. The chancellor also said that Germany will work on eliminating dependence on Russian energy imports.

Meanwhile, European Council President Charles Michel has said that he believes Russia has committed alleged war crimes in Ukraine, but it is nonetheless necessary to maintain dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I deeply believe that there are war crimes being committed by Russia in Ukraine. On the other hand, out of necessity, I believe that we must maintain dialogue with Vladimir Putin, because, whether we like it or not, today it is he who is sitting in the Kremlin,” Michel said on Twitter.

Ukraine ready to accept neutral status

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is prepared to discuss its neutrality status as part of a peace deal. Speaking in an interview with Russian journalists on Sunday, the President said, “The most important issues in the negotiations with Russia are security guarantees, neutrality and Ukraine’s nuclear-free status.”

According to New York Times, he gave a 90-minute-long Zoom interview to four prominent journalists from Russia, the country invading his. The journalists were Ivan Kolpakov, the editor of Meduza, a Russian-language news website based in Latvia; Vladimir Solovyov, a reporter for Kommersant, a Moscow-based daily newspaper; Mikhail Zygar, an independent Russian journalist who fled to Berlin after the war began; and Tikhon Dzyadko, the editor of the temporarily shuttered, independent television channel TV Rain, who had left Moscow for Tbilisi, Georgia.

The President said, “We do not discuss ‘denazification’ and demilitarisation at all. I said that we will not sit at the negotiating table at all if we talk about some kind of demilitarisation, some kind of ‘denazification’. For me, these are completely incomprehensible things.

“Ukraine is prepared to discuss adopting a neutral status as part of a peace deal with Russia but it would have to be guaranteed by third parties and put to a referendum. Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it. This is the most important point,” the President added.

During the interview, the President gave a graphic description of what he claimed was the Kremlin’s disregard for both Ukrainian and Russian lives, to the pointthat the Russian army was slow to pick up the bodies of its fallen soldiers, NYT reported.

He further said that Mariupol has been completely blocked by the Russian military. While confirming that people were leaving the city through humanitarian corridors using civilian transport, he said that Russia had “organised the forcible removal of Mariupol residents to the occupied territories”, The Guardian quoted the president’s office statement.

Zelenskyy said, “According to our data, more than 2,000 children were deported. Which means they were abducted. Because we do not know the exact locations of all these children. There were children with and without parents. It’s a catastrophe, it’s horrible. The reality is that the city is blocked by the Russian military, all entrances and exits from Mariupol are blocked, the port is mined. The humanitarian catastrophe in the city is obvious. Because food, medicine, and water can’t be delivered. The Russian troops are shelling humanitarian convoys and killing drivers.”

He said that several humanitarian convoys could not reach Mariupol due to Russian shelling. He further said that an attempt for agreement with Russian was made for the removal of bodies of killed soldiers and civilians but the removal could not be made.

“To make you understand in the city there are corpses lying on the roads, on the sidewalks. Corpses are just lying around – no one cleans them – of Russian soldiers and citizens of Ukraine.” Following his interview, the Kremlin responded by waning the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview”.

Kremlin supporters harass anti-war Russians

As Russia continues shelling Ukrainian cities, the Russian activists and journalists have had their homes vandalised by unknown pro-Kremlin people for speaking out against the invasion. According to BBC, the apartment doors have been daubed with threatening graffiti labelling the people inside a “traitor”, with messages featuring the letter “Z” – a pro-Kremlin symbol of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In another case, a journalist found a a pig’s head wearing a wig on his doorstep with an anti-Semitic sticker stuck to his door. Alexei Venediktov, editor of adio station Ekho of Moscow before it stopped broadcasting amid censorship, had shared photos of vandalism. Another journalist, Darya Kheikinen said she had found “traitor” scrawled in large red letters on the door of her St Petersburg apartment.

There were also messages like “a traitor to the motherland lives here” pinned to her home. Since Russia’s war in Ukraine, life for the citizens opposing it has become increasingly difficult. On March 16, President Vladimir Putin said, “Any people, and especially the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouth.”