In his address to the UN Security Council today, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spurned any temporary ceasefire and called for a long-term peace agreement with Ukraine.
TASS picked out several elements of his speech to summarize. First, Moscow has been “ready for negotiations” all along, but only “to achieve precisely such a lasting and just peace.” And this is what U.S. President Trump had also said at Anchorage, “not some ceasefire deal, but a long-term peace agreement... that would reliably end the war.”
Importantly, Lavrov demolished the idea that Russia would be played again by Europe, as it had been respecting the 2015-22 Minsk Agreement: “Having learned from bitter experience, we will not pause the special military operation for the duration of negotiations in any format.” He explained that Europe wants a pause so that it could replenish Ukraine’s arsenals: “Although this is precisely what Europe wants, all with the same simple goal: to gain a respite and replenish the depleted military arsenals of the Kiev regime.”
He reminded the Security Council: “If Europeans hadn’t resorted to fraud and had forced the opposition to comply with the agreement signed in February 2014 under the guarantee of Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw, it would have preserved Ukraine’s territorial integrity within the very borders of 1991 that [Vladimir] Zelensky and his Western patrons dream of. But Europeans failed to suppress their age-old instinct to lie and try to achieve their goals by criminal means.”
He then blew away the “No Nazis here in Ukraine” game, stating that the “apotheosis of Ukraine’s Nazification was the recent kneeling by Zelensky and other figures of his regime before the ashes of Hitler’s collaborators, which were transported from Europe for reburial in Kiev with royal honors.” And “our former [European] allies in the struggle against Hitler’s Nazism are now turning a blind eye to such actions.” The celebrated “European values” being defended in Ukraine are those of “racism, persecution of religion and priests, glorification of Nazism... the very values upon which the European Union rests today.”
