Lavrov Says Ukraine War Would Have Ended Had Anchorage Deal Held
Sergey Lavrov said the Ukraine conflict would have ended a year ago if the US had stuck to the Anchorage understandings, and confirmed talks with Marco Rubio.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that the conflict in Ukraine would have ended a year ago had the United States honoured understandings reached at last year's summit in Anchorage, Alaska.
Speaking at an event in Moscow, Lavrov said Washington had drifted from those understandings and that Europe had pulled it further away. Had that not happened, he argued, there would have been no war for the past year.
He was referring to a meeting held last year between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a US military base in Anchorage. In the period that followed the summit, Trump appeared to align with the Kremlin's position on a ceasefire, saying in a social media post that the best route to ending the war was a direct peace agreement rather than a ceasefire, which he said often does not hold.
Despite those earlier discussions, Lavrov said Russia would keep up its military operations for now and rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's call for an immediate ceasefire. Moscow, he said, is seeking a comprehensive settlement rather than a temporary truce.
He repeated Russia's long-standing position that after the Istanbul agreements collapsed owing to Western interference, it would not pause what it calls its special military operation for the duration of negotiations.
On the diplomatic front, Lavrov said he is due to meet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session in New York, where he expects to get a clearer picture of the State Department's thinking on the matter.