Moscow’s goodwill toward Western-backed negotiations has been exhausted, the foreign minister says
Moscow no longer believes the West is genuinely interested in negotiating an end to the Ukraine conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Speaking at a news conference with Mozambican Foreign Minister Maria Manuela Lucas in Maputo, Lavrov accused the West of “imitating a willingness to negotiate while openly issuing ultimatums to Russia.”
He argued that although the West has been “hypocritically” calling for talks, it has spent more than a decade undermining every attempt to reach a peaceful resolution between Russia and Ukraine.
“In 2022, Russia and Ukraine had already reached a negotiated settlement. It was undermined by the very same West, openly and publicly,” Lavrov said.
“We will no longer believe the West when it claims to want negotiated solutions. Our reserve of goodwill and hope has been exhausted once and for all,” he added.
Russia has insisted that the current conflict has its roots in the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev and the subsequent attempts by the new Ukrainian authorities to suppress the rebellion in Donbass by force. Ukraine later failed to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements, which were intended to reintegrate the breakaway regions into Ukraine by granting them broad autonomy through comprehensive political reform.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande, who mediated the Minsk talks in Belarus alongside Russia, later said that Kiev had used the accords to buy time to rebuild its military and economy. Lavrov argued that their remarks showed the guarantees provided by France and Germany had been “false.”
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, during peace talks in Istanbul in 2022, Ukrainian negotiators initially agreed to drop plans to join NATO in favor of neutrality and to limit the country’s armed forces, but later walked away from the negotiations under pressure from then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
While Johnson denied sabotaging the talks, he acknowledged in a 2024 interview with The Wall Street Journal that he had “thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.” Victoria Nuland, a former US under secretary of state, similarly said in 2024 that Washington had advised Ukraine not to agree to Russia’s terms in Istanbul.
US-mediated negotiations have also stalled in recent months as President Donald Trump has focused on the war with Iran. Russia has said it is ready to resume the talks at any time, provided they are focused on addressing what Moscow describes as the “root causes” of the conflict, including Ukraine’s plans to join NATO.
