MOSCOW, April 19. /TASS/. Security guarantees on Ukraine in the Istanbul agreement did not cover Crimea and Donbass, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
"What kind of guarantees were in this Istanbul document? In the end, we were ready to accept, as the Ukrainian delegation wanted, that these guarantees were extremely serious. Well, the limit of seriousness was defined by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. They were very serious security guarantees. And it was specifically written down that these security guarantees do not apply to Crimea and Donbass," he said in an interview with the radio stations Sputnik, Govorit Moskva and Komsomolskaya Pravda.
According to Lavrov, this meant that Crimea and Donbass "cannot be touched."
The document said that there will be no military bases in Ukraine, and it also pointed out that no maneuvers, military exercises with the participation of third countries will be held in the country unless all guarantor countries agree. "That is, including us, including China," the top diplomat explained.
"But then, when everything was agreed, suddenly Ukrainian negotiators came and said that, for example, on the issue of maneuvers with the participation of third countries, let's replace the wording 'if all guarantor countries agree' with 'unless the majority agrees.'" "It was a wake-up call that either they had already been banned overnight, or one of them said: 'Let's give these Russians another warning,'" Lavrov pointed out.