Lavrov Says Russia To Take Measures If West Provides No Response On Security Guarantees

Russia will take necessary measures, should the West fail to provide a constructive response to Moscow’s initiatives on guarantees of security, Sergey Lavrov said, speaking in the State Duma Wednesday.

"Should there be no constructive response, should the West continue its aggressive course, then, as [President Putin] said repeatedly, Moscow will take necessary response measures," the Minister said. "In any case, everyone must consider the security of Russia and its citizens an absolute priority, and it will be ensured under any circumstances."

The United States has promised Russia that it will provide its replies to security guarantee proposals this week. Moscow will not let the West downplay this initiative and brush it under the carpet during endless discussions, Lavrov said.

"Depending on the contents of that reply we and our colleagues from other agencies will draft our proposals addressed to President Vladimir Putin regarding further steps. There is a distinct trend towards downplaying our proposals and brushing them under the carpet in endless discussions. In particular, this concerns the attempts to dump this issue onto the OSCE and the insistent calls by the European Union for finding a place for it in these discussions. We will not let this happen. We will not let them emasculate our initiative," Lavrov said.

He stressed that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a meeting in Geneva on January 21 promised that Washington would hand to Moscow its item-by-item replies explaining the US stance in writing already this week.

On December 17 last year, the Russian Foreign Ministry published draft agreements on security guarantees addressed to the US and NATO, which say NATO won’t expand eastward, deny membership to Ukraine and limit deployment of serious offensive weapons, including nuclear ones. There are fewer and fewer countries willing to sacrifice their national interests for the West, or pull chestnuts out of the fire for the United States and the European Union, Lavrov said.

According to him, the world is no longer US-centric or even Western-centric and the unipolar global order will never be restored. "The number of those willing to sacrifice their core national interests and, so to say, pull chestnuts out of the fire for their superiors from Washington and Brussels is declining," the Russian top diplomat emphasized.

Lavrov pointed out that the vast majority of countries shared Russia’s principled approaches, which rejected the West’s diktats in terms of ideology and its geopolitical "zero-sum games."