Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, stated in a virtual interview with the US NBC broadcast on the 22nd that “President Putin is ready to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky if the summit agenda is prepared, but such an agenda is not prepared at all, and there are no plans for a meeting yet,” Reuters reported on the 24th.
Lavrov’s statement came only seven days after US President Trump met with President Putin in Alaska, effectively dismissing the possibility of a summit that President Trump had hinted at.
Prior to this, President Trump had said at a White House meeting on the 18th, attended by President Zelensky and leaders of major European countries, that he was coordinating the summit schedule with President Putin over a phone call.
According to the full NBC broadcast interview released by the Russian Foreign Ministry, Lavrov brought up the Istanbul negotiation proposal that fell through in 2022.
This negotiation plan refers to the draft ceasefire negotiations discussed in Istanbul, Turkey, in March 2022, right after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The core of this plan is that Ukraine would receive security guarantees from permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the UK, China, France, Russia, and the US) in exchange for not joining NATO.
In this interview, Lavrov revealed that President Putin raised the 2022 Istanbul negotiation proposal while discussing Ukraine’s security issues at the US-Russia summit in Alaska on the 15th.
Such a negotiation plan includes Russia as a guarantor, making it a condition that Ukraine can hardly accept.
The Russian Foreign Ministry rebutted Western media criticism on the 22nd that Lavrov’s statements were undermining the peace process by declaring that his remarks “represent the consistent position of the Kremlin, which remains unchanged even after the summit in Alaska on the 15th.”
[Photo Credit: AP=Yonhap News]
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