Kyiv, March 28 : 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.” 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”. RNJ