Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at today’s press conference with Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, was asked about resolving the Ukraine conflict. [He first noted]( https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/2042424/) that Kiev had negotiated with Moscow in April 2022 “on the basis of eliminating the root causes” of the conflict and that Ukraine’s draft document, agreed to by Russia, had “the basic principles of ensuring security in the post-conflict period. It was about ensuring this security honestly and collectively, primarily by creating a group of guarantor countries, which would include permanent member states of the UN Security Council. Germany and Türkiye were mentioned.”
He pointed out: “These countries would guarantee the security of Ukraine, in fact, in line with the logic underlying Article 5 of the Washington Treaty on the creation of NATO. But it was emphasized that Ukraine would remain a nuclear-free, neutral and non-aligned state ... components ... enshrined in the 1990 Declaration on Sovereignty and Independence of Ukraine.” They “served as the basis for Ukraine to be recognized as an independent state.” But the intervention of “then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson” destroyed the peace settlement. However, “we consider the principle that was laid down in Ukraine’s proposals to be absolutely natural and relevant today. This is the principle of collective provision of security guarantees.”
Today, again the “Coalition of the Willing,” “have followed Voilodymyr Zelenskyy to Washington and tried to promote their agenda aimed at ensuring that security guarantees are based on the logic of isolating Russia and uniting the Western world with Ukraine in order to continue its aggressive confrontational policy of containing the Russian Federation, still meaning the infliction of a ‘strategic defeat.’” They “are directed against the efforts of U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom we are actively and concretely cooperating in the search for long-term, sustainable ways to resolve and eliminate the root causes of the crisis.”
