The head of Russian diplomacy said on Friday that he wanted diplomacy and “not war”, after the American call to “return to the negotiating table” and not to invade Ukraine.
“We have chosen the path of diplomacy for many decades”, declared Sergei Lavrov in an interview broadcast on several Russian radios and televisions, “we have to work with everyone, it is our principle”.
“If it is up to Russia, there will be no war. We don’t want wars. But neither will we allow our interests to be grossly flouted, ignored,” he added.
He felt that new sanctions against Russia would lead to a “rupture” between Moscow and the West, while Europeans and Americans said they were preparing particularly painful measures in the event of an offensive against Ukraine.
More than 100,000 Russian soldiers have been massed on the Ukrainian border since the end of 2021, according to estimates by Westerners who fear that an invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s pro-Western neighbor, is imminent.
The Kremlin denies any plan of invasion, but considers itself threatened by the expansion of NATO over the past 20 years and by Western support for Ukraine.
It therefore conditioned the de-escalation to the end of the policy of enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance, in particular to Ukraine, and a return to Western military deployments at the 1997 borders.
But the United States and NATO unsurprisingly formally rejected those key demands from Moscow on Wednesday, while again opening the door to negotiations on reciprocal limits on the deployment of the two nuclear powers’ short- and medium-range missiles. rivals in Europe as well as military exercises near the enemy camp.
Russia was reserved, and said it was preparing a reaction while the United States called on it to “come back to the negotiating table”.
On Friday, Mr Lavrov said he had found “seeds of rationality” in the Western response, “on matters of secondary importance”.
Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron spoke on Friday, the French president wishing to offer his Russian counterpart a “path of de-escalation”.
Washington insists that a Russian attack is imminent or even likely in February, a danger that Ukraine considers less.
“We are not now seeing actions of a military nature that differ from what there was last spring” when Russia had already massed tens of thousands of men near Ukraine, said Oleksiï Reznikov, Minister Ukrainian Defense before the deputies.
According to him, 112,000 Russian soldiers and 18,000 members of the navy and the air force are currently mobilized within a radius of 200 km from the Ukrainian border.