West not willing to negotiate with Russia: Russian FM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday that the West is not interested in negotiating with Moscow on the issue of Ukraine.

The West held multilateral meetings on Ukraine in Jeddah and Copenhagen without inviting Russia, hoping to persuade developing countries to back the Ukrainian president's peace plan, said Lavrov in an interview with the International Affairs magazine, adding that Moscow's vital interests were ignored.

Russia had always been ready for substantive dialogue and had tried for years to make Kiev implement the Minsk agreements, which were aimed at resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine, he said.

Russia had responded to Ukraine's proposal to start negotiations from the first days of the Special Military Operation, but the talks were halted by Ukraine under Western pressure in 2022, he said.

Later that year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky banned any negotiations with the Russian leadership by decree.

The top Russian diplomat said the West sponsors constantly pushed Ukraine to escalate the situation, and that there was no prospect for negotiations between Russia and the West on Ukraine at the moment.

Russia considered the Western calls for negotiations as a tactical trick to buy time and give a respite to the exhausted Ukrainian troops, said Lavrov.