Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that Russia will not suspend its military operation in Ukraine for future rounds of peace negotiations.
Russian officials claim that peace talks with Ukraine are not moving as quickly as they would like, and they accuse the West of attempting to sabotage the discussions by raising war crimes claims against Russian troops in Ukraine, which Moscow rejects.
In an interview with Russian state television, Lavrov said he saw no reason not to restart discussions with Ukraine, but reiterated that when the two sides meet again, Moscow will not cease its military action.
During the first round of discussions between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in late February, President Vladimir Putin ordered a suspension of military action, according to Lavrov, but Moscow’s position has since altered.
‘After we got sure that the Ukrainians were not preparing to respond,’ Lavrov stated, ‘we decided that there would be no respite (in military action) during the future rounds of talks as long as a definitive deal was not achieved.’
On February 24, Russia dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine in what it described as a ‘special operation’ aimed at degrading its southern neighbor’s military capabilities and rooting out ‘dangerous nationalists.’
Ukraine’s soldiers have resisted, and the West has slapped Russia with sweeping sanctions in an attempt to force it to remove its men.
Last week, Lavrov accused Kyiv of presenting Moscow with a ‘unacceptable’ draught peace proposal that differed from past agreements. At the time, Kyiv regarded Lavrov’s remarks as a ruse to destabilise Ukraine or redirect attention away from allegations of war crimes against Russian troops.
In the interview, Lavrov also stated that European Union senior diplomat Josep Borrell’s proposal for the bloc to continue arming Kyiv was a ‘quite significant U-turn’ in European policy.
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