Peace talks with Ukraine are in a “dead-end situation”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his first public address in more than a week. The news comes as Russian forces have started to disperse from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

Putin’s said that his statements on the peace talks were a response to the recent allegations of Moscow of carrying out “war crimes” in Ukraine. Putin dismissed the accusations at a press conference in the Vostochny Cosmodrome.

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Russia will have to continue its “special operation” in Ukraine in order to defend pro-Moscow speakers who lived inside its former Soviet neighbor country, Putin said while answering questions at the conference, according to reports from Reuters.

The last substantial outcome of the Russia-Ukraine peace talks was Kremlin’s forces retreating from Kyiv. However, Western allies have predicted that Russia will shift focus and move its forces to Western parts of Ukraine.

Putin also addressed the situation in Ukraine’s Bucha and said that reports of mass executions were “fake”. The Russian President brought up United States’ involvement in Syria and said that “nobody cared, no one even noticed”, Reuters reported.

“There was no such silence when provocations were staged in Syria, when they portrayed the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government. Then it turned out that it was fake. It’s the same kind of fake in Bucha.”

Hours before Putin’s address, United States President Joe Biden branded Russia’s activities in Ukraine as a “genocide.”

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“Yes, I called it genocide,” he told reporters in Iowa on Tuesday shortly before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington. “It has become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.”

Biden’s comments drew praise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had encouraged Western leaders to use the term to describe Russia’s invasion of his country.