ALMATY, June 21. /TASS/. The peace initiative that Russian President Vladimir Putin outlined on June 14 is Moscow’s fourth proposal on settling the Ukraine conflict, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
"Now we have come up with the next, actually fourth proposal from Russia [on Ukrainian settlement] in the form of an initiative by President Putin on June 14," the top diplomat said at a press conference after a session of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) Council of Foreign Ministers.
Had the agreement on the political settlement not been disrupted in February 2014, Ukraine would have now been within the 1991 boundaries that "it dreams so sweetly now," Lavrov said.
Ukraine itself "destroyed its territorial integrity with the hands of those who came to power through a bloody state coup and began to impose Russophobic and Neo-Nazi rules," Russia’s top diplomat stressed.
"Agreements were reached in Minsk in February 2015 and, had they been implemented, Ukraine would have restored its territorial integrity but, of course, already without Crimea. But Ukraine showed no desire to preserve its territorial integrity at the cost of providing elementary autonomous rights to Donbass, Lugansk and Donetsk, including the right to speak in their mother tongue," he went on to say.
"The next stage, when a chance was missed again to keep Ukraine’s territorial integrity in some form involved the Istanbul accords of April 2022 that also guaranteed Ukraine its territorial integrity but based on the realities that had emerged on the ground by that time," the Russian foreign minister said.
"And again, as you know, Western handlers prohibited [Ukrainian President] Vladimir Zelensky to sign these agreements," Lavrov said.
"I have no doubts that serious politicians, and some have remained there somewhere, understand the need to use some intellectual and diplomatic skills and begin to think about realpolitik instead of concocted illusions," Russia’s top diplomat said.