Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview published in International Affairs that NATO’s calls for Ukraine peace talks are nothing more than a tactical ploy designed to buy time for Kiev to rearm itself.
“The U.S. and its allies do not want the Ukraine conflict to end and their purported peace initiatives are merely attempts to buy Kiev time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with International Affairs.
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| Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov |
Geopolitical issues need to be discussed ‘not with [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelenskyy, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters’, Lavrov said. Negotiating directly with the Americans would make sense, he told the magazine International Affairs when asked about the idea.
Prospects for negotiations between Russia and the West ‘are non-existent at this stage’, Lavrov said, while Kiev ‘Western sponsors are constantly pushing them to up the ante’.
Insisting on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy’s so-called ‘peace formula’ at meetings in Copenhagen and Jeddah – to which Russia was not invited – ‘hardly demonstrates an intention by the West to negotiate with Russia’, Lavrov said. Moscow has dismissed Zelenskyy’s ten-point list of demands as an unacceptable ultimatum unrelated to reality.
Russia has repeatedly tried to negotiate, from the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements to the ‘drastic attempt to convey our concerns to Western capitals’ in December of 2021, Lavrov noted. The West ‘arrogantly rejected’ Moscow’s initiative and ramped up deliveries of weapons and ammunition to Kiev instead.
‘We regard the Westerners’ hypocritical calls for talks as a tactical ploy to buy time once again giving the exhausted Ukrainian troops a respite and the opportunity to regroup, and to send in more weapons and ammunition’, Lavrov said, adding that ‘this is the path of war, not a peaceful settlement process’.
Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, admitted last December that the 2015 Franco-German proposal in Minsk was ‘an attempt to give Ukraine time’ to build up its military. This was then confirmed by former French president Francois Hollande“. -RT
“The future looks rather grim for the Kiev authorities and their patrons. The longer the armed clashes last, the less appetite will the Western investors have to contribute to post-conflict recovery in Ukraine, and the weaker their faith in Ukraine’s success on the battlefield, or its ability to preserve its statehood in any form or within any borders”, Lavrov stated.
With neither Russia nor NATO looking poised to settle for an armistice, it remains an open question as to how much NATO countries are willing to waste in money and arms before they finally surrender to the fact that Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces has failed and that the Kiev regime is incapable of defeating Moscow no matter how much military aid it receives from its Western backers.