MOSCOW. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned today that the deployment of peacekeeping forces by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Ukraine would provoke a direct confrontation with Russian troops.
During a speech at Moscow’s State Institute of International Relations on Wednesday, the senior official warned that the Polish authorities had announced they would convene a NATO summit soon and that the alliance would need to send peacekeeping forces.
“I hope they understand what’s at stake. It would be a direct clash between the Russian armed forces and NATO troops, which everyone not only wanted to avoid, but supposedly should never happen,” he said, according to the news agency. TASS.
The Russian foreign minister did not rule out that after the offer to send peacekeepers to Ukraine, Warsaw plans to establish a headquarters in the Ukrainian city of Lviv on the border between the two countries and then to stay there.
“The second purpose of this provocation is that not only peacekeeping has already been talked about. The Baltic states said they could send some small battalions to defend Ukraine,” Lavrov said, urging NATO to “keep calm.”
Earlier, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared that Ukraine has the right to invite “anyone it wants” to its territory, including NATO peacekeepers, commenting that Russia “will not dare to attack the alliance”.
In another part of his speech, the head of Moscow diplomacy emphasized that European countries have shown that they are unreliable partners, so Russia is being strengthened.
He explained that the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Brics Group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and other mechanisms will be priorities for strengthening exchanges.
“If Europe comes to its senses, we will not close the door,” but Moscow will examine possible cooperation proposals “from qualitatively different positions,” he said.
Russia began a military operation in Ukraine on February 24 after authorities in the selfproclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics requested help to repel mounting aggression from Kyiv.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the aim of the operation is to protect the people of Donbass from the abuses and genocide in Kyiv over the past eight years, in addition to “demilitarizing” and “denazifying” Ukraine.
He also reiterated that Moscow cannot allow Kyiv to acquire and further militarize nuclear weapons, which poses a threat to the country’s security. He stressed that the continued eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Organization (NATO) was unacceptable to Russia.