Ukrainians are not `naive`: President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after Russia pledges to scale down attack

The reaction came hours after Russia said to reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions.

New Delhi: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday (March 29, 2022) reacted to Russia's promise to scale down its military operations around Kyiv and Chernihiv and said that Ukrainians are not 'naive'. 

The statement came hours after talks between Moscow and Kyiv took place in Istanbul where Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin made the promise.

"In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing (an) agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions," Russian Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin told reporters.

He, however, made no mention of other areas that have seen heavy fighting, including around Mariupol in the southeast, Sumy and Kharkiv in the east and Kherson and Mykolaiv in the south.

"Ukrainians are not naive people," Zelenskiy reacted.

"Ukrainians have already learned during these 34 days of the invasion, and over the past eight years of the war in Donbass, that the only thing they can trust is a concrete result," he added.

The general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said that Russia's promise to curtail military operations in some areas was "probably a rotation of individual units and aims to mislead."

According to the US, Russia has started moving very small numbers of troops away from positions around Kyiv in a move that is more of a repositioning than a retreat or a withdrawal from the war.

Britain has said that it is "highly likely" that Russia will seek to divert combat power from the north to their offensive in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east.

It's now been more than a month into the largest attack on a European nation since World War Two that has killed and injured thousands, Vladimir Putin's troops began the attack on February 24 and it has so far forced nearly 4 million to flee abroad.

(With agency inputs)