ANTALYA, March 10. /TASS/. Russia will find an effective way to prevent further external attempts to destroy its economy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced on Thursday following talks with Ukrainian and Turkish Foreign Ministers Dmitry Kuleba and Mevlut Cavusoglu.
"We will make sure that we never find ourselves in a similar situation again and that no ‘Uncle Sam’ or anyone else can make decisions that are aimed at destroying our economy," he said. "We will find a way to no longer depend on it, and it should have been done a long time ago," Lavrov added.
He added that the accusations against Russia regarding the use of oil and gas supplies as a weapon are absolutely baseless. "As for oil and gas: we leave it all to the discretion and conscience of our Western colleagues," he said, adding "We have never used oil and gas as a weapon, although they (Western colleagues - TASS) regularly accuse us of it."
At the same time, Russia does not see any partner in the West who would be willing to handle matters honestly, Lavrov said. "As for our initiatives, we put them forward in all seriousness on December 15. When we deal with honest people, we handle matters honestly and had it been like that, everything would have been resolved and security agreements would have been reached. However, we don’t see partners who would be willing to deal with us honestly," he pointed out.
"I do hope that the Western leaders who are currently greatly concerned about the developments in Ukraine will eventually realize that there is, I would say, an existential threat to all of European security, which stems from their complete inaction and unwillingness to fulfill previous agreements," the Russian top diplomat noted.
In December 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry released draft agreements on the security guarantees that Moscow expects to receive from Washington and NATO. The documents particularly oblige NATO to cease its eastward expansion and return its military infrastructure to the 1997 borders. The United States and NATO handed their written responses to Russia’s security proposals over to Moscow on January 26, 2022. The West failed to make crucial concessions, Russia said in its own response in February.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation in order to protect people "who have been suffering from abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years." The Russian leader stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories.