By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s “common sense” aim to end the war in Ukraine, but accused the European powers which have rallied around Kyiv of seeking to prolong the conflict.
Lavrov said the United States still wanted to be the world’s most powerful country and that Washington and Moscow would never see eye to eye on everything, but that they had agreed to be pragmatic when interests coincided.
“Donald Trump is a pragmatist,” Lavrov told the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, according to a transcript released by the Foreign Ministry. “His slogan is common sense. It means, as everyone can see, a shift to a different way of doing things.”
“But the goal is still MAGA (Make America Great Again),” Lavrov said, referring to Trump’s political slogan. “This gives a lively, human character to politics. That’s why it’s interesting to work with him.”
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 with thousands of troops, triggering the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.
The West and Ukraine describe the 2022 invasion as an imperial-style land grab by President Vladimir Putin and Kyiv has vowed to defeat Russia on the battlefield, though Russian forces control nearly one-fifth of Ukraine.
Putin casts the conflict in Ukraine as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
CRUCIBLE OF WAR
Trump has upended U.S. policy on the Ukraine war.
On Friday, he and Vice President JD Vance clashed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office. Trump accused Zelenskiy of disrespecting the United States, said he was losing the war and had no cards left.
European leaders leapt to Zelenskiy’s defence.
But Lavrov criticised Europe, saying that for the past 500 years Europe had been the crucible of “all the tragedies of the world” including colonisation, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon Bonaparte, World War One and Adolf Hitler.
“And now, after (former U.S. President Joe) Biden’s term, people have come in who want to be guided by common sense. They say directly that they want to end all wars, they want peace,” Lavrov said.
“And who demands a ‘continuation of the banquet’ in the form of a war? Europe.”
Lavrov also dismissed European ideas for sending in a contingent of European peacekeepers and said Russia had no trust in Ukraine after the collapse of the Minsk agreements, which were designed to end a separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Europeans, Lavrov said, could not explain what rights Russian speakers would have under the European peacekeeper plans, adding that Russia did not like the idea of Europeans propping up Zelenskiy.
“Now they also want to prop him up with their bayonets in the form of peacekeeping units. This will mean that the root causes will not disappear,” Lavrov said.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Helen Popper)
Comments