MOSCOW, December 6. /TASS/. Many in Russia would like to make the lifting of sanctions a condition for an agreement on settling the crisis in Ukraine, but the country has withstood them and grown stronger, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.
"I would say probably many people in Russia would like to make it (lifting sanctions - TASS) a condition. But the more we live under sanctions, the more we understand that it is better to rely on yourself, and to develop mechanisms, platforms for cooperation with ‘normal’ countries who are not unfriendly to you, and don't mix economic interests and policies and especially politics," the top diplomat said.
"And we learned a lot after the sanctions started. The sanctions started under President Obama. They continued in a very big way under the first term of Donald Trump. And these sanctions under the Biden administration are absolutely unprecedented. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you know. They would never kill us, so they are making us stronger," Lavrov pointed out.
At a meeting with the leadership of the Foreign Ministry on June 14, President Vladimir Putin named the conditions for resolving the situation in Ukraine. Among them are the withdrawal of the Ukrainian armed forces from Donbass and Novorossiya, and Kiev's refusal to join NATO. The rights, freedoms, and interests of Russian-speaking citizens must also be fully ensured in Ukraine. Russia considers it necessary to lift all Western sanctions against it and establish a non-aligned and non-nuclear status for Ukraine. However, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated on December 4, there are currently no grounds for Russian-Ukrainian negotiations.