-
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, rejected Ukraine peace plans touted by Trump and his circle.
-
“We are certainly not satisfied with the proposals,” Lavrov said.
-
Idea floating included posting European troops in a buffer zone, and distancing Ukraine from NATO.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected plans associated with President-elect Donald Trump to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.
In an interview with Russian state news agency TASS published Monday, Lavrov criticized what he said he understood Trump’s plane to be.
Here is how he phrased it, per an English translation of the interview posted by Russian’s foreign ministry:
“…their idea is to suspend hostilities along the line of contact and transfer responsibility for confrontation with Russia to the Europeans. We are not happy, of course, with the proposals made by members of the Trump team to postpone Ukraine’s admission to NATO for 20 years and to station British and European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.”
The plans have not officially been announced by Trump — they resemble a report by The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed people close to the president-elect.
Trump claimed on the campaign trail that he could bring the Ukraine war to an end within days, but said he would not describe how.
In a December 12 interview with Time magazine, also cited by Lavrov, Trump again said that he couldn’t describe his plan in detail.
He said he wanted to “reach an agreement,” and described the number of casualties from the war as intolerable.
It marks a significant shift from President Joe Biden’s policy of providing Ukraine with open-ended support and leaving decisions on when to negotiate with Russia up to Kyiv.
Trump said in the Time interview that Biden was wrong to allow deeper Ukrainian strikes into Russia, which he said escalated the conflict.
Lavrov’s dismissal of the reported ideas follows Vladimir Putin on December 26 rejecting the possibility of freezing Ukraine’s progress to NATO membership for 20 years.
Lavrov said Russia seeks an agreement “that would eliminate the root causes of the conflict and seal a mechanism precluding the possibility of their violation.”
The Kremlin has long claimed that it launched the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine to halt the possible eastward expansion of NATO, the security treaty that’s been the main bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.
Western countries, and Ukraine, contend that Ukraine did not pose a threat to Russia, and say Putin instead wants to conquer territory that used to be part of the Soviet Union.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, said Lavrov’s remarks indicate that Russia will likely refuse “to consider any compromises” to its demands for Ukraine to become permanently neutral and disband its military.
Read the original article on Business Insider
