Feb 18, 2025
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said his country won’t accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine under any peace deal, following high-level talks with the US in Saudi Arabia.
“Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything. It is of course completely unacceptable,” he said.
Russia and the US said they had agreed to appoint teams to start negotiating the end of the war.
“Today is the first step of a long and difficult journey, but an important one”, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said following the meeting.
Ukraine was not invited to the talks, which its president Volodymyr Zelensky said was a “surprise”.
The meeting in Riyadh was the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russian and American delegations are known to have met face-to-face.
Also at the meeting in Saudi Arabia were US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, as well as Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.
Afterwards, Lavrov said the US and Russia would appoint ambassadors to each other’s countries as soon as possible and create conditions to “restore co-operation in full”.
“It was a very useful conversation. We listened to each other, and we heard each other,” he said.
He reiterated Russia’s previous position that any expansion of the Nato defence alliance – and Ukraine joining it – would be a “direct threat” to Russia.
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