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Russia still ready to work with the West on Middle East direction — Lavrov

According to the Russian foreign minister, Washington wants to participate in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process not on the UN-approved principles

MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. Moscow is still ready to work with the West on the Middle East direction, just like before, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, speaking at the Primakov Readings forum Wednesday.

"We are still ready to work with the West on the Middle East direction. It were not us who suspended the ‘quartet’ of mediators (Russia, the US, the EU and the UN), who worked under the Security Council approval as the only legitimate mediation body for the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The Americans want to work on it themselves," he said.

According to the Minister, Washington wants to participate in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process not on the UN-approved principles.

"[The US] seek to substitute these Security Council-approved principles with an approach that is based on an attempt to economically satisfy the Palestinians and make them come to terms that they will not have their own state," he said.

"It is not us who walk away from the format; on the contrary, we have been proposing for the last three or four years to reanimate this format, but this is not a part of the Americans’ plan," Lavrov concluded.

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