In the wake of Washington-Moscow negotiations last weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a sustained effort to identify for Americans what Russia finds to be a solid basis for the future. Without ignoring the U.S.’s weaponization of sanctions for economic warfare, the saber-rattling and such, he explained that the U.S. and President Trump had shown they could address the underlying roots of the strategic crisis—as opposed to the incapacity of the deep-seated, 500-year-old colonialist mentality of Europe.
Two days ago, Lavrov hosted a three-hour dinner for four respected Western analysts—Alastair Crooke, John Mearsheimer, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Larry Johnson—and, as the latter two reported, it was just open diplomacy, where Lavrov invited them to ask about anything they wanted. Then yesterday, Napolitano was invited on to Russia’s “Great Game” show to join host Dmitry Simes to interview Lavrov. The Foreign Ministry posted the whole interview.
Asked how, after Washington’s failure to follow through on two specific agreements—the Anchorage agreement with Russia and the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran (U.S. President Trump “reneged on it a few hours” after signing)—Moscow could trust Washington, Lavrov first explained Washington submitting to the European war party. It was important that Washington actually initiated the Anchorage peace proposal:
“It was not our initiative. The proposal in question was put forward by Steve Witkoff just a few days before the Anchorage meeting. President Vladimir Putin... did not give his approval when this proposal was presented to him in Moscow. However, upon his arrival in Alaska, he stated that he had reflected upon it and concluded that any agreement, in one form or another, necessarily entails elements of compromise, yet he was prepared to take responsibility for accepting it, believing that the people would understand his decision.”
Though lacking “certain specifics, yet the fundamental principles of a settlement were outlined therein. President Vladimir Putin accepted all of these principles without amendment…. Of course, subsequently, the European allies of the United States were dismayed, rushed to Washington, and began to exert pressure on the leadership of the American administration. In June this year, at the G7 summit in Evian, President of France Emmanuel Macron boasted that they had ‘buried’ Anchorage. Allegedly, the United States was now aligned with them. Donald Trump was now with them. And they were, once again, all united against Russia. That was the situation as it stood… [It] is evident that Europe made no secret of its principal objective—to prevent the Americans from upholding their own proposal, accepted by President Vladimir Putin, in its original, unamended form.”
Then, asked whether Washington negotiators were “honest brokers” or not, Lavrov elaborated at greater length on his theme of the day, that “sets the Trump administration apart from the rest of the Western world: they actually acknowledge reality. By that I mean both Russia’s legitimate security interests … and the will of the people who have lived on those lands for centuries, and who, through little more than a quirk of history, ended up as part of the Ukrainian SSR. That recognition is no small thing.”
