Russia warned this Wednesday that he will not remain “arms crossed” in the face of the actions of the West, whom he accused of trying to obtain unilateral advantages and of Incite Ukraine to provoke Moscow.
“We will not stand idly by“, stressed the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, referring to Western pressures to achieve “greater containment of Russia”, in an intervention in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament.
The head of Russian diplomacy denounced that The West increases political-military pressure about Russia. “Just look at the increasingly provocative maneuvers along our borders, the pulling of the Kiev regime into NATO’s orbit, the arms supplies, and how they goad it into direct provocations against the Russian Federation,” he said.
He warned that Russia will adopt the “necessary response measures” if he does not receive from the West a “constructive response” to his demands for security guarantees, which the Kremlin expects this week.
The minister insisted that Moscow will not allow the debate to drag on of the proposals for security guarantees presented to the United States and NATO, and hopes that they will fulfill the promise to respond to these in writing. “Depending on the content of that response, which is expected this week, together with our colleagues from other institutions, we are going to prepare proposals for the president (Vladimir Putin),
The security guarantees demanded by Russia include putting brake on further expansion of the Alliance, in particular to Ukraine and Georgia, the cessation of all military cooperation with the former Soviet republic and the withdrawal of NATO troops and weapons to the positions they occupied before 1997.
Confidence in dialogue
The Kremlin also expressed its wish that the meeting this Wednesday in Paris between the political advisers of the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, known as Normandy format for peace in Donbas, generate “the maximum result” possible amid current tensions.
“I hope there is a good, open dialogue, with the maximum possible degree of efficiency,” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, in his daily telephone press conference. “What maximum possible degree means, it is very difficult to say now,” he added.
The political advisers of the leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, of the so-called Normandy Format, will meet this Wednesday in Paris to try to unblock the peace process for Donbas, where the Ukrainian Army and pro-Russian separatists have clashed since 2014. All this in the midst of tensions around Ukraine due to the deployment of more than 100,000 Russian soldiers near the border with the neighboring country.
The last face-to-face meeting of the Normandy Format at the level of political advisers took place on January 12, 2021 in Berlin. Later, the contacts within the Quartet were held electronically. Germany and France want to revive the Normandy Format, whose last summit at the level of leaders took place in 2019 in Paris and which since then has not made any major progress except in the exchange of prisoners.
In the first and last meeting between the presidents of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, nine points were agreed upon, including the exchange of prisoners according to the principle of “all for all”, the separation of forces in three areas of the contact line and the holding of elections and the granting of a special status to the pro-Russian separatist territories.
Ukraine insists on a new summit, but Russia believes that Kiev should sit down to negotiate not with Moscow, but with the rebels supported by the Kremlin in Lugansk and Donetsk, since it considers that what is happening in eastern Ukraine is a “civil war” and that Russia is not part of it. More than 14,000 people have died in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, according to the UN.
In addition, Russia accuses Ukraine of failing to comply with the Minsk Peace Agreements to resolve the conflict in Donbas, while Kiev thinks the same about Moscow. Ukraine points to Russia as a violating party to the agreements as an “aggressor state” that annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and got involved in the conflict in Donbas.