Moscow says it’s ready to have a ‘normal conversation’ with the West — RT Russia and the former Soviet Union
However, it is useless to read “statements that have already been made in public,” said a senior Russian diplomat.
Moscow is ready to have a substantive discussion with the Western collective as a whole or any party, said Sergey Belyaev, director of the second European department of the Russian Foreign Ministry. The top diplomat made the remarks in an interview with RTVI published on Tuesday.
Russia is ready to talk “anyone, with the British and, in general, with the Finns, the Swedes, anyone”, Belyaev pointed out. “If there’s a desire to sit down and have a normal conversation about ways to normalize the situation, about ways to minimize risk – and there are risks.”
At the same time, no negotiation makes sense if the “a conversation with us is only necessary to sit down at the table and read to us, as sometimes happens, the statements that have already been expressed in public”, he added.
The diplomat pointed to the inability of Western nations to negotiate meaningfully, recalling the aftermath of the explosions that severely damaged Nord Stream pipelines last September. Despite repeated calls from Moscow for a joint investigation into the incident, the West has shown a highly suspicious reluctance to conduct a transparent investigation, Belyaev noted.
“To all our proposals [on the potential probe] either there was no answer, or the answer was an emphatic “no”. The question arises: if they don’t want to investigate with us, then why? he wondered.
Relations between Russia and the West had been strained for some time, but entered a downward spiral last February after Moscow launched its military operation in neighboring Ukraine, citing kyiv’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, which aimed to give Donetsk and Lugansk a special status within the Union. Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian, German and French leaders have since admitted that kyiv’s main goal was to use the deal to win time in kyiv to reinforce his army.
The operation was preceded by Moscow calling for a comprehensive, multi-party agreement on security guarantees, but this was outright rejected by Washington.
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