Russia has rejected the deployment of European troops in Ukraine and suggested having a “veto right” over any post-war support for the country in a major blow to the US-lead peace negotiations.
In a press conference on Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the European countries’ proposal to deploy troops to Ukraine after the war was “unacceptable” for Moscow and amounted to “foreign intervention”. “We support the principles and security guarantees that were agreed … in April 2022. Anything else is of course an absolutely futile undertaking,” Lavrov said with reference to conditions of the initial peace talks held in Istanbul in 2022.
“Moscow won’t agree with collective security guarantees negotiated without Russia. Russia will accept if the security guarantees to Ukraine are provided on equal basis with the participation of countries like China, the United States, the United Kingdom and France,” the minister said.
Lavrov’s remarks came as the US and the EU are considering possible security guarantees for the post-war Ukraine. Trump said this week that the Kremlin had agreed to NATO-style Western security guarantees for Ukraine, which allows member countries to intervene when any of them is attacked. Lavrov’s latest statement suggests that Moscow is backing away from that position and is a major blow to the peace negotiations spearheaded by the Trump administration. Lavrov’s statement came at the heels of Russia’s largest air raid on Ukraine in the past weeks. The Kremlin has also played down the holding of a bilateral meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin.
The Russian deputy representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, told the BBC on Wednesday that Moscow hadn’t rejected the opportunity for direct talks, "but it shouldn't be a meeting for the sake of a meeting". His remarks came after Trump renewed calls for Zelenskiy-Putin meeting.
