Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the leaders of the Azov regiment had returned to Ukraine from Turkey.
"The return of the Azov leaders from Turkey to Ukraine is nothing more than a direct violation of the terms of the existing agreements. Moreover, in this case, the conditions were violated by both the Ukrainian side and the Turkish side," Peskov said, when asked the relevant question.
No one informed Moscow about the step, the Kremlin spokesman said, adding that under the terms of the agreements reached, the Azov leaders had been supposed to stay in Turkey until the end of the Ukraine conflict.
According to Peskov, "this decision to extradite the leaders of Azov to Zelensky in violation of existing agreements, to return them to Ukraine, of course, is directly related to the failures in the counteroffensive. These are the failures that the troops of the Kyiv regime are now facing every day."
Azov, a regiment within the National Guard of Ukraine, gained notoriety due to the neo-Nazi views of many of its militants and human rights abuses committed by the group since the beginning of the Donbas crisis.
Last year, Russian troops surrounded Mariupol on March 7 and liberated virtually the entire city by April 21. At the Azovstal plant, Russian forces managed to block more than two thousand Ukrainian soldiers and militants of Azov. In mid-May, they began to surrender, and on May 20, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the complete liberation of Mariupol.
Denis Pushilin, the acting head of the Donetsk People's Republic said in September 2022 that as a result of the exchange of prisoners with Ukraine, 215 people, including the leaders of the Azov regiment, had been transferred to Kiev. The exchange of prisoners was also confirmed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In January 2023, the Hurriyet newspaper reported, citing Turkish sources, that the Azov leaders were in Turkey at Russia's demand.