MOSCOW, November 18. /TASS/. The publication of letters between Russia’s foreign minister and the top diplomats of France and Germany has debunked Western claims that Russia had declined to cooperate for a Normandy Format meeting on Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.

Zakharova spoke on the Solovyov Live YouTube channel and referred to the publication on Wednesday of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's correspondence with his French and German counterparts, Jean-Yves Le Drian and Heiko Maas, respectively.

"Moscow responded promptly to the requests from its partners in Berlin and Germany," she said. Russia made numerous proposals that were "worth pursuing," she said.

Reports that were telling a different story to the public were meant to portray Russia as "uncooperative and impossible to negotiate with" and put the blame for the failure of the Minsk agreements on Moscow while "covering up for Kiev," the spokeswoman noted.

The diplomatic correspondence was published to remove any doubt about Russia’s intentions for the broad public, the international community and Ukrainians, she said.

These diplomatic messages don’t just contain pleasantries, but also specific proposals for the Normandy Format talks so "we don’t just smile in front of the cameras and then return to the capitals and make contradictory and conflicting statements, but reach a practical result that would cause some efficient steps," she said.

"No longer will it be possible to claim that Russia took an unconstructive position, proposed nothing and that all it did was block everything," Zakharova stressed.

In an October 29 message to French and German foreign ministers, Lavrov emphasized the importance of continued mediation efforts as part of the Normandy Format but said a potential ministerial meeting "should be well prepared," including the development of a joint statement "with specific recommendations" for Ukraine and the self-proclaimed republics as the parties to the conflict. The Russian foreign minister sent a Russian proposal for the statement to his counterparts and suggested that the time and place for the talks could be set following a discussion of the document.

In further messages, Lavrov said the response of France and Germany was "disappointing," referring to the statements by Le Drian and Maas that Russia's proposal contained provisions that are "unlikely to be accepted" in the Normandy Format, like the establishment of a direct dialogue between Ukraine’s government and the self-proclaimed republics.

Lavrov said the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine was performing poorly and would live up to its mandate only if that dialogue was established. The diplomat criticized an alternative statement put forward by France and Germany because of their interpretation of the Minsk agreements. Commenting on the proposal to meet in Paris on November 11, which had been made by his counterparts, Lavrov said that Moscow would first seek to determine what would be discussed and take stock of how the decisions of the previous meetings were implemented. He also said he had told the French foreign minister on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Rome that he would be unable to meet that day as he had a full schedule of previously agreed-on events.