MOSCOW, April 24. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky sees ongoing war as a de facto security guarantee, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
"The West is now in hysterics: Zelensky states that they will not leave the Donetsk Region - and this is a part of his security guarantees. It means that he sees war itself as a security guarantee," Lavrov said.
"The West tells him that the most important thing now is to stop the fighting, just freeze where everyone is, and provide Ukraine with security guarantees, including, as the French and British dream, intentions to deploy some multinational stabilization forces [on Ukrainian territory]," he said.
"It all means only one thing - they want to provide the Nazi regime with security guarantees," Lavrov added.
According to Lavrov, Ukraine is an issue that concerns everyone and is currently the subject of a head-on clash between Russia and Europe. "The Americans, of course, are interested first and foremost in advancing their own interests, but they are the only ones, as I have said many times before, among all countries to have publicly acknowledged the root causes of this conflict," he went on to say.
"US President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that Ukraine must forget about NATO. And this was one of the main root causes of the conflict, when Ukraine was being prepared through a series of Maidan protests, coups, and the cancellation of elections (as happened in 2004) to let its territory be used to create modern high-tech military threats to our country’s security right on Russia’s borders. At the same time, the Americans say they are ready to take into account the territorial realities as they emerged after the referendums. I cannot recall anyone else saying that they are willing to recognize the results of the referendums and the outcome of the territorial issues resulting from them. And they even advocate for the entire Donbas, the Donetsk and Lugansk regions (no one even tries to pretend about Crimea anymore), to be recognized as Russia’s territory, as envisaged in our constitution," he stated.
Zelensky and guarantees
The top Russian diplomat recalled that Zelensky had recently travelled to Cyprus to meet with EU officials.
"They are discussing with him guarantees for him and his clique to remain in power and to preserve everything that was another major root cause of the current situation," he said. "I mean the war on and legislative elimination of everything that is linked with Russia this or that way: the Russian language in education, mass media, and culture, and the extermination of canonical Orthodoxy."
"This is also part of the West’s civilizational aggression against Russia because they plotted and began to create civilizational threats on our state borders of that period in the very heart of the Russian world," Lavrov added.