MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday said he will discuss Kiev’s troop buildup in Donbass with his Western counterparts at a meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council this week.
"This is alarming," he told reporters, referring to the troop buildup. ‘’I think [our] Western colleagues are aware of this because Ukraine does nothing without informing them and securing their support."
"As part of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Stockholm tomorrow, this will be one of the issues that I will discuss with Western colleagues, asking for their assessment of the situation," he went on to say.
Russia previously reached out to the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission, through bilateral contacts with Germany, France and some other Western countries, to bring up the fact that Ukraine had dispatched troops and military equipment to the contact line, initially attributing it to rotation needs, Lavrov stated. In fact, he said, these were additional forces because the troops they were supposed to replace had never left.
The Foreign Ministry earlier said that Lavrov would have bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the OSCE Ministerial Council session with Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy; Ann Linde, the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office and Swedish Foreign Minister; Helga Schmid, the OSCE Secretary General; US Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and the foreign ministers of Austria, UK, Hungary, Serbia, Spain and Turkey.