The Kremlin on Wednesday said that any bilateral discussions about security guarantees between Kyiv and its respective partners in Europe and North America would have to include Moscow, or else risk become nothing more than a pipe dream for the West.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov menaced that “seriously discussing security guarantees without the Russian Federation is a utopia, a road to nowhere.”
This messaging was in stark contrast to what his boss, Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump reportedly discussed at their summit in Anchorage, Alaska, last week.
At that meeting, Trump said he walked away with the understanding that while Ukraine joining NATO was off the table, the US and European countries were free to devise their own security guarantees with Kyiv.
On Tuesday, Trump specified that the Americans would not be providing boots-on-the-ground soldiers as part of any such commitment, but rather envisioned a contribution of US air support so that Ukraine could effectively control is own skies.
He went on to say that Europe could provide the types of ground forces and other defenses that President Volodymyr Zelensky has requested.
On Wednesday, NATO military chiefs held a video summit on those types of security guarantees. This gathering presumably prompted Lavrov’s knee-jerk response: While, on the one hand, individual members were reportedly welcome to ink their individual agreements, the Kremlin did not foresee a collective discussion among Allied representatives.
“On #Ukraine, we confirmed our support. Priority continues to be a just, credible, and durable peace,” NATO’s military committee chair, Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, wrote on social media after Wednesday’s meeting.
Moscow signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, aimed at ensuring security for Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in exchange for their giving up numerous nuclear weapons left from the Soviet era. But Russia violated that first by taking Crimea in 2014, and then by starting a full-scale offensive in 2022, which has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions to flee their homes.
On Tuesday, the US Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, held talks with European military leaders on the “best options for a potential Ukraine peace deal.”
According to AFP reports, Lavrov “downplayed” Monday’s meeting between the allies in Washington, describing it as a “clumsy” attempt to change the US president’s post-Alaska position on Ukraine.
Lavrov also scoffed at any imminent meeting between Putin and Zelensky, saying that any summit between the two bitter rivals “must be prepared in the most meticulous way,” so it does not lead to a “deterioration” of the situation surrounding the conflict, in which Moscow has recently had the upper hand, militarily.
The foreign minister has been spotted wearing shirts emblazoned with “USSR” (“CCCP”, in Cyrillic letters), rejecting charges of imperialism and defending the sartorial choice by saying that even students from Moscow State University also have taken on the sweatshirt trend, explaining that all of this injects “an element of humor” into recent events.