MOSCOW, March 16. /TASS/. Moscow is ready to agree to Ukraine having weapons that don’t threaten Russian security, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on RBC television on Wednesday.
"We won’t, of course, forget about the goal of demilitarization" of Ukraine, he said in an interview. "Ukraine can’t have weapons that pose a threat to Russia. We are ready to agree only to weapons that don’t pose a threat to us."
Lavrov said the issue is unrelated to Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. Even the country isn’t a NATO member, "the US or someone else could ship offensive weapons to Ukraine on a bilateral basis," the minister said.
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in response to a request for help by the heads of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories, but aims to demilitarize and de-Nazify the country. The Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian troops are not targeting Ukrainian cities, but are incapacitating Ukrainian military infrastructure, so there’s no threat to civilians.