Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that any talks about security guarantees for Ukraine must involve Russia, calling the discussions about guarantees without Moscow’s participation “utopian thinking that leads nowhere.”
Lavrov’s comments come as a group of European countries led by the UK and France, which is calling itself the “Coalition of the Willing,” is insisting on the idea of deploying troops to Ukraine as part of a future potential peace deal. President Trump has also backed the idea and suggested the US could support the European troops with air power. Russia has made clear that the idea of troops from NATO countries being deployed to Ukraine is a non-starter.
“We cannot agree with the current proposal to resolve issues of collective security without Russia. This cannot work,” Lavrov said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. “I am confident that the West, especially the United States, understands perfectly well that discussing security issues without Russia is utopian thinking that leads nowhere.”
Lavrov pointed to a draft peace deal from April 2022 that included security guarantees involving the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, France, the UK, China, and Russia — and potentially other countries, including Germany and Turkey.
“In other words, Ukraine’s proposal clearly stated that these guarantees would be equal, and that the security of all interested parties, including Ukraine’s neighbors, would be ensured on an equal, indivisible basis,” he said. “At that time, in April 2022, Russia supported this position.”
While the details of the draft peace deal from April 2022 weren’t exactly clear, they were a far cry from the NATO Article 5-style security guarantees that the US and Europe are discussing now. During the negotiations in 2022, Moscow’s main demand was for Ukrainian neutrality, and it was not seeking territory, but the talks were discouraged by the US and its allies, an effort led by then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“Boris Johnson, the then UK prime minister, arrived and forbade his subordinates in Kiev from signing anything, demanding that they continue fighting,” Lavrov said.
