The events commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy will be a good pretext to discuss the situation in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
“We will have ceremonial events tomorrow dealing with the Normandy landings, and President [Vladimir] Putin will take part in them. We want to pay our tributes to the memory of all those who set up the Second Front and fortified the Red Army’s victorious movement.”
“I think this will also be a good occasion to combine our efforts today to prevent new conflicts on the European continent, so that we could find ways and methods to combine our efforts to restore peace in Ukraine,” Lavrov told journalists following his meting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Paris on Thursday.
Only the Ukrainians themselves can reach reconciliation in their country, Lavrov said. “We should help them, and none of external players influencing various Ukrainian parties should foment sentiments, provoke irreconcilability, or try to provoke other parties into taking some actions that would be programmed to achieve a victory over the other part of the Ukrainian people,” he said.
“This is what we are likely to do tomorrow,” he said.
