Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has ruled out the deployment of foreign troops to Ukraine in any potential peace settlement, a refusal that will complicate and possibly derail the fledgling US-led effort to end the conflict.
The comments, which Lavrov made during a meeting with India’s Foreign Minister in Moscow, came after a week of intense diplomacy between American and European leaders over security guarantees for Kyiv ahead of a possible trilateral peace summit between the US, Russia, and Ukraine in the coming weeks.
Central to those security guarantees is the idea of a ‘reassurance force’ made up of soldiers from European countries, who would serve as a deterrent to any future Russian attack.
But on Thursday Lavrov said Moscow has always viewed foreign troops in Ukraine as “absolutely unacceptable for Russia” according to Russian state-controlled media TASS.
Instead, the Russian foreign minister points to a communiqué drafted by the war parties in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion back in 2022 as the basis for security guarantees.
This so-called Istanbul communiqué would mean Ukraine “does not join any military alliances, does not deploy foreign military bases and contingents”. It would also force Ukraine to self-declare as a “permanently neutral state”, effectively meaning it cannot align with Europe or NATO in any way.
Discussions on the communiqué were broken off after evidence of extensive war crimes was discovered in the liberated Ukrainian towns of Irpin and Bucha in April 2022.
EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has already reacted on Bluesky, questioning who is “the real boss in [the] Kremlin?” and pointing out that Lavrov’s view seems to not match that of his boss, Vladimir Putin.
(mk)
