March 14, 2025 (EIRNS)—Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on March 13, rejected the characterization of the ceasefire proposal that came out of the U.S.-Ukraine meeting in Jeddah on March 11 as a take-it-or-leave-it offer. A reporter asked Lavrov why the U.S. keeps insisting on a temporary ceasefire when the Russians have already made clear that such a thing is unacceptable. “They are not insisting,” he replied, according to a transcript posted by the Russian Foreign Ministry. “The Americans announced that they had discussed this with the Ukrainians. They are waiting for our reaction.”
Lavrov noted that Putin “has repeatedly pointed out that ceasefires have been negotiated on several occasions since 2014, as history shows. The Minsk agreements, and previously, the agreements that were scrapped in February 2014, and the Istanbul agreements—each of those accords included a ceasefire. However, each time an agreement was reached and a ceasefire announced, it turned out that the Ukrainians had lied to us with the support of their ‘partners,’ who are also from Europe.
“If the Europeans now want to make the Ukrainians ‘outwit the Americans’ as well, I think that the Trump Administration is fully aware of their intentions and will see through them,” he concluded. “What we need is a stable and enduring peace based on eliminating the root causes of the current situation in Ukraine.”
