Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said Russia is against the deployment of Western peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of any agreement to end the nearly three-year conflict.
The possibility of deploying foreign troops in Ukraine to enforce any peace deal is being discussed in Western capitals, with French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk discussing the issue at a meeting in Warsaw this month. In an interview published by the Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday, Lavrov told the state-run Tass news agency that Moscow opposed that idea and others proposed by US President-elect Donald Trump.
“Of course, we are not satisfied with the proposals raised by the representatives of the president-elect to suspend Ukraine’s NATO membership for 20 years and to send a peacekeeping force of ‘British and European troops’ to Ukraine,” he said. The Kremlin had previously said it was “too late to talk about peacekeepers.”
Trump, who will take office in three weeks, has claimed that he can reach a peace deal within 24 hours and has said that Washington’s billions of dollars in economic and military aid to Kiev will be used as leverage.
However, he has yet to propose a concrete plan. Members of his team have floated various ideas, including the deployment of European troops to monitor any ceasefire along the 1,000-kilometer front line and Kiev’s long-delayed ambition to join NATO. Both the Russian and Ukrainian presidents have rejected direct talks with each other, and Kiev and Moscow’s positions appear to differ widely on what are acceptable terms for a peace deal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously demanded that Ukraine withdraw its troops from four eastern and southern regions – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia – which Russia claims have been annexed. Kiev has repeatedly refused to cede the territories to Moscow in exchange for peace.
