Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow doesn’t want war, but stressed that it Won’t Allow to Ignore Its Interests.
Speaking to four major Russian radio stations on Friday, the top Russian diplomat commented on the US and NATO’s written response to Russia’s security guarantee proposals.
“If it’s up to Russia, there will be no war; Moscow does not want war, but will not allow the West to grossly ignore its interests”, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during the interview.
The interview follows the delivery of written responses from the US and NATO to Russian security guarantee proposals presented by Moscow in mid-December amid heightened tension over Ukraine.
The contents of the responses haven’t been made public, with NATO and the US saying they hope that Moscow won’t reveal them either.
However, US State Secretary Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Yens Stoltenberg said they will uphold NATO’s “open door” policy.
One of the proposed paragraphs of the Russian draft agreements would obligate NATO to give written guarantees that it will not expand further to the East.
Moscow insists that states that were members of NATO in May 1997, before the first eastern European countries were invited to join the bloc, should not “deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe” that weren’t already in place at the time. Commenting on the security guarantee proposal talks, the Russian foreign minister stated that they are ongoing.
“…the Americans and NATO, as you know, have been studying the extremely simple proposals concluded in the draft treaty with Washington and the agreement with the North Atlantic Alliance for more than a month. We received answers only the day before yesterday, which, in such a Western style, cast a shadow on negotiations in many ways, but there is some rationality, as I already said on secondary issues,” Lavrov said.
According to the foreign minister, Russia wants to “work honestly” when it comes to its proposals on security guarantees, but the West “hysterically” develops the topic of Russia’s alleged threat to Ukraine.
Earlier on Thursday, Lavrov said the written responses by US and NATO fail to address Moscow’s concerns over the eastward expansion of the military alliance.
“There is no positive reaction on the main issue in this document,” Lavrov told journalists in Moscow Thursday.
“The main issue is our clear position on the inadmissibility of further expansion of NATO to the East and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.”
Source: CNN
