Europe will try to appeal for a frozen conflict in Ukraine in order to continue the war, says Lavrov according to state-controlled Russian media.
The Russian Foreign Minister is traveling to the Saudi capital Riyadh together with Yuri Ushakov, an experienced foreign policy advisor to President Putin and former US ambassador, among other things.
Their main goal is to restore relations between Russia and the USA. According to Russian sources, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree on this. European countries should not have anything to say about it, according to Sergey Lavrov:
If they are only going to sit at the negotiating table in order to continue the war, why invite them?
"The big guys"
The talks are intended to lead to more concrete negotiations about the war in Ukraine – and for a meeting between the US President Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin, according to the Kremlin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
The USA will be represented by Foreign Minister Marco Rubio, Trump's national security advisor Mike Waltz, and Steve Witkoff, the President's Middle East envoy, who has been given an increasingly important role in the Ukraine war as well.
The choice of Lavrov as negotiator is an expression of Russia seeing the negotiations as a high-level meeting, believes Jan Hallenberg, professor emeritus of political science.
Now Russia and the USA will come to an agreement on this. It is the "big guys" who matter and the "small fry" in the EU and Ukraine are peripheral in this context. That is the signal the Russians want to send, at least, he says to TT.
Zelensky on a transit visit
Ukraine has not been invited to the talks, at least not at this stage. However, when "real negotiations" begin, the Ukrainian government will be involved, according to the American Foreign Minister Rubio.
Zelensky is traveling to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, which is described as a visit that has been planned for a long time.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the Russian forces met strong resistance and a multi-year war ensued. Russian forces entered the neighboring country as early as 2014, which led to the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and a simmering conflict in Donbass in the east.
The independent Ukraine's balancing act between East and West was put to the test in 2014, when extensive demonstrations broke out against the Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych after he backed out of a cooperation agreement with the EU. During a few days, over 100 people were killed in the protests. Yanukovych was ousted by parliament and fled to Moscow.
When Russia's President Vladimir Putin launched the large-scale war, he claimed to have demanded a veto right over Ukraine's desire to join NATO. He has asserted that the state of Ukraine has no right to exist, with lies about its democratically elected government being a "Nazi regime" that commits genocide against ethnic Russians.
Ukraine's allies, primarily the USA and the EU, have provided the Ukrainian defense with significant support and punished Russia with sanctions for the invasion war. In Moscow, the war has over time come to be described in existential terms, as a conflict between Russia and a united Western world.
