Moscow will defend its legitimate interests, the foreign minister has said
Collective security in Europe cannot be resolved without Russia’s participation, as Moscow will “firmly” defend its own legitimate interests, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
Kiev and its Western European backers have increasingly demanded “security guarantees” as a precondition for any potential peace deal with Russia. While several NATO states have voiced their readiness to deploy so-called “reassurance forces” to Ukraine, Moscow has repeatedly warned that it will not accept troops from the US-led military bloc in the country.
“We cannot agree with the proposal that security issues, collective security, be resolved without the Russian Federation. This will not work,” Lavrov said.
Russia does not overstate its interests, but we will ensure our legitimate interests firmly and harshly.
Lavrov added that the West, and primarily the US, now “perfectly” understands that discussing security issues without Russia is “a road to nowhere.”
Kiev’s negotiating team had proposed developing security guarantees that involved all the permanent members of the UN Security Council during the early Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul in 2022, soon after the escalation of the conflict, Lavrov said.
Russia, China, the US, France, the UK and some other individual countries were to be involved, and each interested party’s security guarantees were to be ensured on an equal basis, he said, adding that Moscow had supported this approach.
However, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had “arrived and forbade his proteges in Kiev from signing anything, and demanded that military actions be continued,” according to Lavrov.
Now, while US President Donald Trump is increasingly pushing diplomacy to end the conflict, Kiev’s Western European backers “are just trying to keep the US as a participant, less and less successfully,” Lavrov said.
According to the top diplomat, the European NATO states want to get Washington to continue to supply arms, so that they can “continue to pump the Kiev regime full of these weapons.”
