(Reuters) -Moscow expects talks between Russia and Ukraine to continue but “new territorial realities” must be recognised and new systems of security guarantees formed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in remarks published on Wednesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered tens of thousands of troops to invade Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops. Russia now controls a little under one fifth of Ukraine.
“For peace to be durable, the new territorial realities … must be recognized and formalized in international legal terms,” Lavrov said in an interview to Indonesian Kompas newspaper, according to a transcript provided on the website of Russia’s foreign ministry.
“A new system of security guarantees for Russia and Ukraine must be formed as an integral element of a pan-continental architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.”
In an indirect reference to Moscow’s continued opposition to Ukraine joining NATO, Lavrov said that “Ukraine should be guaranteed a neutral, non-aligned, and non-nuclear status.”
Ukraine says it is not for Russia to decide what Kyiv can or cannot join, while NATO says that Russia can have no veto over membership of the alliance which was formed in 1949 to counter the threat from the Soviet Union.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who held a summit with Putin in Alaska in mid-August and subsequently met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and key European and NATO alliance leaders at the White House in efforts to bring an end to the war, said on Tuesday he was “very disappointed” in the Russian leader.
Trump had expected Zelenskiy and Putin to meet after the summit. Zelenskiy has said Russia is doing everything it can to prevent the meeting, while Russia says the agenda for such a meeting is not ready.
Lavrov said the heads of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations were in direct contact.
“We expect negotiations to continue,” Lavrov said.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Stephen Coates)
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