Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was not easy to agree with the US on the main details of a possible peace agreement to end the war in Ukraine and that Russia would never again allow itself to be economically dependent on the West, on Tuesday, the 14th of April, according to Reuters.
US President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodshed” of Ukraine war.
“It is not easy to agree on the key elements of a settlement. They are being discussed,” Lavrov said in an interview with Kommersant newspaper, answering a question on whether Moscow and Washington had agreed on some aspects of a possible peace deal.
“We are well aware of what a mutually beneficial agreement looks like, which we have never rejected, and what an agreement that could drag us into another trap looks like,” Lavrov said in the interview published on Tuesday.
The Kremlin said on Sunday it was too early to expect results for a restoration of more normal relations with Washington.
Lavrov said Russia’s position was made clear by President Vladimir Putin in June 2024, when he demanded that Ukraine formally renounce its ambitions to join NATO and withdraw its troops from all four regions of Ukraine that Russia is demanding.
“We are talking about the rights of the people who live in these lands. That is why these lands are dear to us. And we cannot give them up by allowing people to be thrown out of them,” Lavrov said.
Russia currently controls about 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and parts of four regions that Moscow now considers part of Russia, although most countries do not recognise this.
Lavrov praised Trump’s “common sense” and the fact that previous US support for Ukraine’s efforts to join the NATO military alliance was the main reason for the war in Ukraine.
But the Russian political elite, he said, would not tolerate any steps that would lead Russia back to economic, military, technological or agricultural dependence on the West.
Lavrov said that the globalisation of the world economy had been destroyed by the sanctions imposed by the administration of former US President Joe Biden on Russia, China and Iran.
Biden, Western European and Ukrainian leaders described Russia’s 2022 invasion as an imperial land grab, repeatedly vowing to defeat Russian forces.
Putin sees the war in Ukraine as part of a struggle with the declining West, which he claims has humiliated Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by expanding the NATO military alliance and encroaching, in his view, into Moscow’s sphere of influence.