Russia ruled out an immediate meeting with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, since the diplomatic tension with him intensified and the mediation efforts of the United States seemed to stop.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that “no meeting” between President Vladimir Putin and Zelensky was planned, since NATO Chief Mark Rutte visited kyiv, largely to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, had increased the expectations of a rapid summit among Russian and Ukrainian presidents when he said at the beginning of the week they had agreed to meet, but on Friday he compared the two men with “oil and vinegar.”
“They don’t get along very well, for obvious reasons,” journalists in Washington told journalists.
Lavrov also poured cold water with the hopes of direct conversations of Putin-Zensky to resolve the conflict, now in his fourth year, questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian President and repeating the maximalist statements of the Kremlin.
“There is no planned meeting,” Lavrov said in an interview with NBC ‘Meet the press with Kristen Welker’.
Lavrov told the American station that Putin was “ready to meet Zelensky” as soon as an agenda was prepared, and added that the agenda “was not ready at all.”
In kyiv, speaking with Rutte, Zelensky said that Ukraine “had no agreements with the Russians,” saying that Ukraine had agreed only with Trump about how the diplomatic direction could proceed.
On Thursday, he accused Russia of “trying to leave a meeting,” and added that Moscow wanted to continue the offensive.
‘A utopia’
The issue of possible security guarantees for Ukraine has been the front and in the center during the last diplomatic impulse led by the United States to negotiate a peace agreement to end the conflict.
Trump said previously that Russia had agreed to some Western security guarantees for Kyiv. But Moscow then threw doubts about any agreement of this type, Lavrov said Wednesday that discussing them without Russia was “a utopia, a road to anywhere.”
“When Russia raises the issue of security guarantees, honestly, I still don’t know who is threatening them,” said Zelensky, who wants foreign troops in Ukraine to deter Russian attacks in the future.
The Kremlin has said for a long time that he would never accept that, citing the ambition of Ukraine NATO as one of the pretexts for his assault.
“There are several principles that Washington believes that they must be accepted, including NATO membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelensky said no to everything,” Lavrov told NBC.
In a visit to Kyiv, during which an alert of air attacks sounded throughout the city, Routte said that security guarantees were needed to ensure that “Russia will maintain any agreement and will never try to take a square kilometer of Ukraine.”
Moscow signed the Budapest memorandum in 1994, which aimed to guarantee the security of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in exchange for renouncing numerous nuclear weapons that remain from the Soviet era.
Russia raped him first when he took Crimea in 2014, and then at the beginning of a large -scale offensive in 2022, who has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions to flee their homes.
Trump can ‘do nothing’ if Putin, Zelensky does not meet
Trump said Friday that he would make an “important” decision in two weeks in the peace efforts of Ukraine, specifying that Moscow could face massive sanctions or could not do anything.
Trump told journalists in the Oval office that “he was not happy” with a Russian strike on Thursday that he hit an American property factory in Ukraine, and “I am not happy that anything has to do with that war.” But he said he wanted to see if Putin and Zelensky would be first.
“I think I will know. I think I will know Russia’s attitude and, frankly, from Ukraine. Two are needed,” Trump said when he was asked what he would do at the end of a two -week period he established to evaluate the state of peace conversations.
“So I’m going to make a decision about what we do and it will be a very important decision,” he said. “That is whether or not they are massive sanctions or massive rates or both. Either we do nothing and we say it is your fight.”
