KYIV — Despite optimistic pronouncements from President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials about imminent results in efforts to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Moscow’s top diplomat on Thursday rejected a central condition of the proposed deal.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed a bilateral security agreement between the United States and Ukraine — a key condition Kyiv that officials say is needed for them to sign the deal — saying “that such security guarantees are unlikely to ensure lasting peace.”
Details of the security agreement are not known, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this week that the guarantees were “100 percent ready” for signing, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Wednesday that “you could argue” that the guarantees “are agreed to from our side of the equation.”
Lavrov told journalists in Moscow that he did not know the specifics of the agreement, but said that “apparently, these are guarantees for the very Ukrainian regime that pursues a Russophobic, neo-Nazi policy.”
Russia justified its brutal invasion of Ukraine four years ago in part by fabricating reports of attacks on a Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and claiming falsely that Ukraine was led by a regime following a Nazi ideology.
“If the goal is to preserve this regime in some part of the territory of former Ukraine and continue to use this regime as a springboard for creating threats to the Russian Federation,” then there would be no peace in the future, Lavrov said in his remarks.
He added that Russia “will look at real proposals” for Ukraine’s security arrangements “and will not be guided” by “very public games.” In the past, Moscow has insisted that it must be part of any security framework for Ukraine — potentially giving it a veto over any response to Russian violations.
As United States-brokered peace talks to resolve the conflict in Ukraine are set to resume this weekend in Abu Dhabi, Lavrov’s remarks were a stark reminder that a number of significant hurdles are blocking and may eventually doom a final settlement — not the least of these being the Russians’ own stance toward an independent Ukraine.
This comes as Trump remarked on Tuesday that “we’re looking at some very good things happening on Ukraine and Russia,” without providing further details.
In addition to security guarantees, the issue of territory is also hindering the talks, officials say.
U.S., Ukrainian and Russian officials have made no secret that the main sticking point is the fate of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The Kremlin insists that the whole region should be given to it as part of a final settlement — citing an agreement reached with Trump during the summit in Alaska — despite its inability after nearly four years of fighting to seize the final, heavily fortified portion of it.
The issue of Donetsk is “still a bridge we have to cross. It’s still a gap,” Rubio told the Senate. “But at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one.”
But for the Ukrainians, any territorial concessions must also come with ironclad security guarantees, to dissuade Russia from resuming hostilities in the future. Foremost in Kyiv officials’ minds is the failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which stipulated that Moscow would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.
For the Ukrainians, the issue is not only what is being promised, but also the timing of the agreement. Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials say they need to have the guarantees signed before they embark on any territorial concessions.
A Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, characterized the impasse over signing security guarantees as a “sequencing issue.”
“From the American side, they don’t want to sign this unless everything is agreed on the other aspects, including the territories, which of course is not agreed,” the diplomat said. “But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue. The territories can only be dealt with at the highest levels, and then you need Putin and Zelensky involved. We are turning around that.”
A breakthrough in the discussions would involve talks among the leaders — otherwise, the diplomat said, the negotiators risk going “on and on in circles because these decisions can only be taken by the heads.”
It is precisely the lack of high level officials in the Abu Dhabi talks that show they aren’t serious, said European Union foreign policy head Kaja Kallas, noting that the Russian delegation consisted of military and intelligence officials.
The military officials “do not have a mandate to agree on anything, which means that they are definitely not serious about peace,” she said ahead of a meeting of the E.U.’s Foreign Affairs Council on Thursday.
“It is the opposite,” she said. “They are bombing Ukrainians, trying to bomb and freeze them to surrender.”
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia contributed to this report.
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