MOSCOW, March 10. /TASS/. Russia does not see any partner in the West who would be willing to handle matters honestly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference following a meeting with his Ukrainian and Turkish counterparts, Dmitry Kuleba and Mevlut Cavusoglu.
"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 response to our proposal to make an agreement between Russia and NATO based on the principles that I had mentioned, which did not appear out of thin air but from documents signed at the highest level, that would be formalized and legally binding, we received a reference note from Mr. Stoltenberg [NATO secretary general] and another one from Mr. Borrell [EU top diplomat], which were about half a page long and said: don’t worry, we are ready to talk. And that’s all," Lavrov emphasized. "The fact that it wasn’t NATO and the EU, but individual countries that signed the obligations we demanded to be implemented, means that the United Kingdom and other Western leaders had simply delegated their powers to the NATO secretary general, making him responsible for whether the pledges enshrined in the documents adopted at OSCE summits would be implemented or not. This is what Western countries made of diplomacy," Lavrov explained.
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.