Moscow said on Monday that the solution to the over two-year-long Russia-Ukraine war will be on the battlefield if the West wants it so.
“If they (the West) want a solution to the conflict in Ukraine on the battlefield, then it will be on the battlefield,” acting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a Federation Council meeting in which consultations are being held on his reappointment.
Expressing that Russia is ready for negotiations not only in words, but also in deeds, Lavrov said they were “one step away” from ending the conflict in Ukraine during talks in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul back in March 2022.
Lavrov further said that those talks were the last time Moscow, “despite numerous previous deceptions from the West, decided to still believe and show goodwill.”
“They deceived me again, forced me to fight again,” he said.
Lavrov also touched on the upcoming Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland on June 15-16, saying that the event boils down to drawing up an ultimatum to Moscow.
“The conference has long been on the lips of all those who are trying to defeat Russia on the battlefield, without abandoning diplomatic methods, as they say. But those diplomatic methods and the conference in Switzerland are not an exception, but only a continuation of the Copenhagen process, and boil down to formulating an ultimatum to Russia,” he said.
He further expressed that his Swiss counterpart Ignazio Cassis asked for a meeting back in January in New York on the sidelines of a UN Security Council meeting on Palestine, saying Cassis told him that they would first talk among themselves.
"This, you know, is like a poor student, there is a teachers' council, they kicked him out, they decided everything among themselves, then they called him in and announced the verdict. You can't talk to anyone like that, least of all to us," Lavrov said.
"(Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy has already directly said what this Swiss told me in private, that we must first put together a coalition and finally consolidate this formula, and then present it to Russia, it's not about negotiations. And in principle, even if they invited us now, even if they invited us right away, we are still invited to discuss only Zelenskyy's (peace) formula,” he added.
The summit in Switzerland will include discussions on Zelenskyy's 10-point formula that was laid out at the 2022 G20 summit in Indonesia, with its final step being the signing of a peace accord. It also focuses on issues such as nuclear safety and food and energy security.
