Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained to the press after a June 21 CSTO foreign ministers meeting in Almaty, Kazakhstan, that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s June 14 broad Eurasian security architecture proposal was “actually the fourth proposal from Russia [on Ukrainian settlement] in the form of an initiative by President Putin,” according to a report published by TASS. “Now we have come up with the next on.”
He recounted that each time Russia’s proposals for a negotiated peace were rejected by Ukraine and the NATO power structure, Ukraine ended up losing more and more of its territory on the battlefield. “In February 2015, new agreements were reached in Minsk and approved by the UN Security Council. If they had been implemented, Ukraine would have restored its territorial integrity—only without Crimea. At that point, this was recognised as a fact by almost all Western countries. Ukraine refused to preserve its territorial integrity by granting basic autonomy to Donbass (Lugansk and Donetsk), including the right to speak their native language….
