UNITED NATIONS (AP) — As new tensions rise between Russia and NATO powers, Moscow’s top diplomat insisted to world leaders Saturday that his nation doesn’t intend to attack Europe but will mount a “decisive response” to any aggression.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke at the U.N. General Assembly after weeks in which unauthorized flights into NATO’s airspace — intrusions the alliance blames on Russia — have raised alarm around Europe, particularly after NATO jets downed drones over Poland and Estonia said Russian fighter jets flew into its territory and lingered for 12 minutes.
Russia has denied that its planes entered Estonian airspace and has said the drones didn’t target Poland, with Moscow’s ally Belarus maintaining that Ukrainian signal-jamming sent the devices off course.
But European leaders see the incidents as intentional, provocative moves meant to rattle NATO and to suss how the alliance will respond. The alliance warned Russia this week that NATO would use all means to defend against any further breaches of its airspace.
At the U.N., Lavrov maintained it’s Russia that’s facing threats.
“Russia has never had and does not have any such intentions” of attacking European or NATO countries, he said. “However, any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response. There should be no doubt about this among those in NATO and the EU.”
Speaking three years into the Ukraine war
Lavrov spoke three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that the international community has broadly deplored.
U.S. President Donald Trump said this week that he believed Ukraine can win back all the territory it has lost to Russia. It was a notable tone shift from a U.S. leader who had previously suggested Ukraine would need to make some concessions and could never reclaim all the areas Russia has occupied since seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launching a full-scale invasion in 2022.
Just three weeks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country and the U.S. had a “mutual understanding” and that Trump’s administration “is listening to us.” Trump and Putin held a summit in Alaska in early August but left without a deal to end the war.
Sounding a notably open note from a country that has often lambasted the West, Lavrov noted the summit and said Russia had “some hopes” to keep talking with the United States.
“In the approaches of the current U.S. administration, we see a desire not only to contribute to ways to realistically resolve the Ukrainian crisis, but also a desire to develop pragmatic cooperation without adopting an ideological stance,” the diplomat said, portraying the powers as partners of sorts: “Russia and the U.S. bear a special responsibility for the state of affairs in the world, and for avoiding risks that could plunge humanity into a new war.”
Trump’s emerging view of Ukraine is part of the equation
Trump’s new view of Ukraine’s prospects came after he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of General Assembly on Tuesday — seven months after a televised blow-up between the two in the Oval Office. This time, the doors were closed, and the tenor was evidently different — “a good meeting,” as Zelenskyy described it in his assembly speech the next day.
For the fourth year in a row, Zelenskyy appealed to the gathering of presidents, prime ministers and other top officials to get Russia out of his country — and warned that inaction would put other countries at risk.
“Ukraine is only the first,” he said.
Russia has offered various explanations for the Ukraine war, among them ensuring its own security after NATO expanded eastward over the years.
Addressing the ongoing and increasingly deadly war in Gaza, Lavrov condemned Hamas militants’ surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but said “there is no justification” for Israel’s collective punishment and killing of Palestinian civilians including children “dying from bombing and starvation.”
The diplomat also said there is no basis for any potential Israeli move to annex the West Bank, which Palestinians consider their territory and a key part of their future state, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem.
Israel hasn’t announced such a move, but several leading members in Netanyahu’s government have advocated doing so. Officials recently approved a controversial settlement project that would effectively cut the West Bank in two — a move critics say could doom chances for a Palestinian state.
Between the Gaza war and the situation in the West Bank, “we are essentially dealing with an attempt at a kind of coup d’etat aimed at burying U.N. decisions on the creation of a Palestinian state,” Lavrov said.
The international community has long embraced a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, saying it would reward Hamas — a position he reiterated Friday at the General Assembly.
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