ULAANBAATAR, April 14. /TASS/. The European Union encourages Kiev to sabotage implementation of the Minsk agreements, Russia will not have with Brussels "business like usual," Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.
"On the background of the events in Ukraine, the EU suspended the work of dialogue mechanisms with the Russian side, introduced limitations against Russian individuals and companies, and pushes Russia to observing the Minsk agreements," Lavrov said in a lecture he delivered at the Mongolian foreign ministry.
"By taking this controversial position, the EU only encourages the Kiev authorities for sabotaging with impunity implementation of Minsk-2," he said.
The minister said there are no problems between Russia and the European Union, which could not be settled "in case of good will of all the parties."
"In order to break up the negative trend, it is necessary to refuse from the ill practice of unilateral actions," Lavrov said. "There is no any longer "business like usual," where were attempts to force us to agreements and cooperation methods."
"We have not introduced sanctions against our Western counterparts, we have not initiated that give-and-take," he said. "They have used those illegitimate, unilateral methods on their own choice, where their project to change the regime in Ukraine failed, and where they lost control over that project, and where clear national radicals came to the power in Kiev and threatened existence of the ethnic Russians and other minorities in Ukraine."
The Russian side was only protecting those, who received physical threats from those who grasped the power in Ukraine, he said in a lecture at the Mongolian foreign ministry.
"Thus, as the sanctions were announced, we realized, the western counterparts were doing so not for good reasons, but due to the failed expectations from the global development tendencies."
Minsk agreements
A peace deal struck on February 12, 2015 in Minsk, Belarus, by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France envisaged a ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and people’s militias starting from February 15, followed by withdrawal of heavy weapons from the line of military engagement and prisoner release. The final document says that the Ukrainian troops are to be pulled back away from the current line of engagement and the militias of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, from the engagement line set by the Minsk Memorandum of September 19, 2014.