“The Russian and Ukrainian delegations are already discussing a possible draft agreement every day via video conference,” Lavrov told the Chinese news agency Xinhua.
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Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that talks between Moscow and Kyiv continued on a daily basis. He also stressed the importance of Ukraine’s commitment to a neutral situation and obtaining security guarantees from Russia and Kyiv.
Speaking to Xinhua, Lavrov noted that the Russian and Ukrainian delegations are already discussing a possible draft agreement daily via video conference.
“The agenda of the talks should also include issues of denazification, recognition of new geopolitical realities, Western sanctions, the status of the Russian language and others,” he added.
Lavrov also told Xinhua that the Moscow-Kyiv conflict, as well as the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, are direct effects of the West’s drive to create a unipolar world, which includes NATO’s relentless eastward expansion.
“The United States and NATO have always seen Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia,” he added.
Lavrov went on to say that the reasons that ultimately led Moscow to launch its military operation in Ukraine stemmed from years of Western policy of instilling anti-Russian feelings in Ukrainians and forcing them to choose between the West and Russia to decide.
“It was the West that first instigated and then supported an unconstitutional coup in Kyiv in 2014,” Lavrov said, referring to an intra-Ukrainian conflict that the United States and its allies never attempted to resolve.
He also accused Washington and its allies of “encouraging” Kiev’s “aggressive anti-Russian course” and “pushing the nationalists towards a military solution” to the Donbass crisis.
The top Russian diplomat claimed that Washington and Brussels also rejected Russia’s proposals for security guarantees in Europe in December 2021, leaving Moscow no choice but to launch a military operation to protect the people of Donbass.
Russia looks to a “peaceful, free, neutral, prosperous and friendly” Ukraine, Lavrov stressed.
He also noted that Moscow wants to restore “hundreds of years of cultural, economic and family ties between Russians and Ukrainians.”
In his opinion, “the United States and its allies are de facto encouraging Kyiv to fight Russia to the last man, arm Ukraine and send its mercenaries” to its territory.
If the United States and NATO were really interested in resolving the Ukraine crisis, they would have realized that the Ukrainian people need humanitarian aid, not Stingers or Javelins, the minister said.
Lavrov added that Russia has delivered about 15,000 tons of humanitarian aid to the Donbas republics, as well as to the Ukrainian territories that its forces have captured since the beginning of the operation.
The top Russian diplomat announced that about 2.8 million people, including 16,000 foreign citizens, have asked Russia to evacuate them from the conflict zone.
So far, Russia has evacuated more than a million people, including 120,000 third-country nationals, and set up more than 9,500 “fully equipped” emergency shelters on its territory, he said.
He added that those fleeing the conflict are also receiving “qualified medical assistance and psychological support.”
According to Lavrov, this is not a “new Cold War” but the ongoing attempts by Washington and its allies to impose their “US-centric world model” on other countries.
He stressed that the United States and its allies want to replace the UN-based world order with their own “rules-based order.”
Noting that Ukraine is not the only place in the world where the United States and its allies are attempting to pursue this goal, the minister cited as examples the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the invasion of Iraq in Year 2003 and the war against Syria this “destructive policy”.
He added that the United States is now pursuing an “explicitly anti-Chinese policy” in the Asia-Pacific region.
Lavrov concluded that Russia’s operation in Ukraine contributes to the process of “liberating the world from the West’s neo-colonialist yoke, which is heavily based on American racism and exceptionalism.”