MOSCOW. March 19 (Interfax) - The Kremlin would like the presidential election in Ukraine to be won by a person who will soberly assess reality and pursue a course toward peace rather than war, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said in commenting on a premise shared by some Ukrainian political analysts that the Kremlin would prefer anyone but incumbent President Petro Poroshenko to win the election.
"It is undeniably better for the Kremlin if whoever comes to power in Ukraine and whoever is elected by Ukrainians as president can soberly assess reality, has political wisdom, and is not a president of war but a president of peace, building relations with all neighbors, including the Russian Federation. We can say that for certain," Peskov said.
Asked whether Russian-Ukrainian relations might improve if Poroshenko wins the election, Peskov replied in the negative.
"As regards who should be [Ukrainian president] in order for our bilateral relations to improve, it can be said for definite that, again, they can't improve with the current one [Poroshenko]," he told journalists on Tuesday when asked whether there is a person among the presidential candidates in Ukraine whose presidency might help Russian-Ukrainian relations to develop more productively.
While visiting Crimea on Monday, President Vladimir Putin "very exhaustively described his attitude toward opportunities for building at least some relations with the incumbent Ukrainian leadership," Peskov said.
"This was done very eloquently, and nothing can be added to this," he said.
Putin said in Simferopol on Monday that there is no animosity between the people of Russia and Ukraine. The only misunderstanding is about the actions of a Ukrainian leadership obsessed with pre-election Russophobia.
"The Russian and Ukrainian people have never quarreled and, I believe, are not in a quarrel now. We simply have a misunderstanding with today's Ukrainian leadership, with whom one is 'unlikely to make porridge' or achieve any positive result in the development of our relations," Putin said during a meeting with communities of Crimea and Sevastopol on the fifth anniversary of Crimea's accession to Russia.
"What they are doing is sometimes simply startling and bewildering," Putin said. "One wants to ask in Ukrainian: have you gone crazy? So, once common sense prevails, we too will be building relations, at the leadership level," he said.
"I hope that this wave of various pre-election situations and combinations in Ukraine that we are now seeing, based on Russo-phobia, will go away and at least some conditions for the development of state-to-state relations will be created," he said.