Billionaire Oleg Deripaska has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. He said this in an interview with Nikkei Asia. The publication notes that the member of the Russian Forbes list called the "military special operation" in Ukraine "madness." When asked about his current relations with the Kremlin, the businessman, who is under Western sanctions, said that there were "no changes" in them, refusing to say whether they were close.

Businessman Oleg Deripaska (in 2024, he took 51st place in the Forbes ranking of 125 Russian billionaires with a fortune of $2.8 billion) has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. He said this in an interview with Nikkei Asia, published on August 8. The publication clarifies that he gave the interview on Monday, August 5. "If you want to stop the conflict, you first have to stop the fire," he said, calling for an "immediate and unconditional ceasefire" in Ukraine, the newspaper writes.

Deripaska, who is under Western sanctions, also called the "military special operation"* in Ukraine "madness," Nikkei Asia notes. The publication reports that when asked about the current relationship between Deripaska and Vladimir Putin, the businessman replied that there was "no change" in them, refusing to say whether they were close. "They [the Kremlin] don't touch me, we don't touch politics," Nikkei Asia quotes him as saying.

This is not the first time Deripaska has commented on the "military special operation" in Ukraine. After it began in February 2022, he was one of the first Russian businessmen to call on the parties to negotiate. "Peace is very important! Negotiations must begin as soon as possible!" he wrote on his Telegram channel. In January 2024, on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Kyiv's peace proposals were discussed, he said that peace in Ukraine would not come before May 2025.

In December 2022, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, commenting on Deripaska's deprivation of land lease rights in Sochi, said that the businessman had never opposed the "special operation". "Like many, he insists that everything be done better and more efficiently. <...> He expressed his point of view," the Kremlin spokesman noted at the time.

After the start of the "military special operation," Russia and Ukraine held several rounds of peace talks in February and March 2022 in Istanbul. The last, fourth meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations took place on March 29, 2022, after which Kyiv withdrew from the negotiation process, the Russian Foreign Ministry indicated. In September 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree that "states the impossibility of holding negotiations with the President of the Russian Federation V. Putin." Moscow has repeatedly stated its readiness for negotiations on Ukraine. In mid-October 2023, Putin said that in order to hold peace talks with Moscow, Kiev must first cancel the decree of the Ukrainian president banning them. In the summer of 2023, Zelensky said that Kyiv was ready to begin peace talks only after Russian troops were withdrawn from Ukrainian territory. On June 14 of this year, Putin named the conditions for a ceasefire and the start of negotiations in Ukraine. According to him, for this, Kyiv must completely withdraw its troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions**, and also abandon plans to join NATO.