‘What We Need Is Definite Guarantees, Not People Changing Their Minds’

From Sovetskaya Rossia, March 27, 2025, p. 4. Condensed text:

Editors’ Note. – The following is an excerpt from Foreign Minister Lavrov’s interview with Channel One, Moscow, March 25, 2025.

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Question. – The talks in Riyadh were important. What was their goal? And how did they end? Could you please comment?

Answer. – The talks are over, and the preliminary agreements that were reached there are currently being reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. As agreed by the two presidents, safe navigation in the Black Sea was the primary subject at the talks. And this was not the first attempt [at negotiating such a deal].

The first time was back in July 2022, when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acted as mediators. Together with Russian and Ukrainian specialists, they negotiated a package [of deals]. It consisted of two parts. One part was to facilitate Ukrainian grain exports through the [Turkish] Straits where vessels were to be inspected. Inspections were necessary to make sure there were no violations. Once a vessel had delivered grain to its destination, it was required to return for the next delivery empty; it could not be used to ship weapons to Ukraine.

Inspection procedures were agreed upon, and they worked for a whole year. But then we had to terminate this deal, or at least to suspend it, because the second part, which was an integral part of the package, was 100% sabotaged. The second portion entailed lifting all the barriers for Russian exports of grain and fertilizers. This was because all the vessels carrying Russian agricultural exports, including fertilizers, had been blacklisted. Lloyd’s, the company that insures merchant vessels, wanted ridiculous premiums. Also, the partners purchasing our goods had difficulties paying for them. Rosselkhozbank was banned from SWIFT. There were a lot of different barriers, and their purpose was to make Russian exports too expensive. This was unfair competition, where European farmers had an unfair advantage over ours. At the same time, Western countries, because of their bias, allowed Ukraine to undersell its grain on European markets, even though Ukrainian grain was of inferior quality and did not meet international standards.

The West was doing everything it could to shift the blame off Ukraine and at the same time to punish Russia as much as possible.

So, when UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres threw up his hands a year after the launch of the Black Sea initiative and said there was nothing he could do about it, we told him, “Well, we can come back and reinstate this deal when you figure out how to make it work.” We simply withdrew from the Ukrainian part of the package, which had been approved for a year. A year passed, and we decided not to extend the deal. The memorandum of understanding between the Russian Federation and the UN Secretariat on promoting Russian food products and fertilizers to the world markets, on the other hand, was signed for three years and remains in effect through July of this year.

Secretary General Guterres and his team work in close contact with us. They are trying to help us. But they are not addressing the root of the problem; they are not demanding that the West lift sanctions against Russia. If the West is genuinely worried about developing countries, about the global majority, especially African countries, it must lift all the discriminatory restrictions affecting food security.

Secretary General Guterres is taking a different approach. Instead of demanding that the West lift its sanctions, he is looking for loopholes. Thus, he is basically recognizing these sanctions and complying with them, which is totally inappropriate for any UN official, let alone the secretary general. The UN Charter clearly says that the staff of the UN Secretariat, including the secretary general and his deputies, cannot receive instructions from any government. If the secretary general is looking for loopholes in sanctions, this means he recognizes them. Thus, he is complying with the decisions made by individual UN members, which he is not supposed to do.

So, members of the Russian delegation, who were authorized by President Putin to conduct negotiations in Riyadh, reminded their US counterparts about this situation, telling them that, given Ukraine’s reputation and everything that happened with the Black Sea initiative, we want to leave no room for ambiguity this time around.

We also reminded them that after the Ukrainian part of the deal expired in 2023, Turkish President Erdogan attempted to extend it two or three times. A year ago, he reached out to us, asking if we could resume the initiative in a simplified form, without inspecting vessels physically as they return home empty, having delivered their grain or fertilizer. We were even willing to waive our demand for inspections. But then President Erdogan told us at the last minute that Zelensky wanted to add one more point to the deal – that the parties agree not to launch attacks against nuclear power plants. In reality, the only person attacking nuclear infrastructure was Zelensky himself. He was the one who ordered attacks against the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. Nevertheless, since Kiev came up with this proposal, we agreed. Again, we did not insist on having verification mechanisms. In other words, we said yes to everything President Erdogan requested, including the request that Zelensky threw in at the last minute for no obvious reason. We said yes to everything. But then President Erdogan called President Putin and told him, “You know, Zelensky has changed his mind.”

This happens time and again. Every time there has been a ceasefire, Ukraine has only agreed because was in a desperate situation on the battlefield. But once it would get a reprieve, Ukraine would immediately, within a few weeks or in a couple of months, break all the terms of the ceasefire. This is what happened time and again under the Minsk agreements.

So this time around we need definite, very specific, verifiable and working guarantees and mechanisms. As President Putin said a few days ago at a joint press briefing with Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, he supports President Trump’s initiative about a comprehensive 30-day ceasefire – not just a moratorium on attacks against energy infrastructure or maritime targets in the Black Sea, but a comprehensive 30-day ceasefire. President Putin said that he supported the idea. But we have to remember that the line of contact is very long and the Ukrainian military has a history of staging false flag attacks. . . .

Our position is simple. I have just explained to you what it is, more or less. We can’t trust this person. We want the grain and fertilizer markets to be predictable. We don’t want others to squeeze us out of the market – and not only because we want to get our share of profit through fair competition, but also because we care about food security in Africa, and other parts of the Global South and the Global East. These countries are suffering the most from the games that the West is playing as it tries to achieve an unfair advantage. Of course, food prices there are not exactly skyrocketing at the moment, but they could have been much lower, had the West stopped meddling in free market operations – something that it extolled so highly when luring us into this “paradise” of globalization and freedom.

Like I said, we will need definite guarantees. And given our negative experience in dealing with Kiev, we believe that these guarantees require a direct order from Washington to Zelensky and his team, telling them unequivocally to toe the line.

It seems to me that our US partners have heard us. They realize that Washington alone can make Ukraine stop its terrorist activities, and its attacks against civilian energy infrastructure that has nothing to do with the defense industry.

Europe, on the other hand, has taken a very different approach. Just as in the times of Napoleon and Hitler, or during the Crimean War, European nations are eager to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia. Just as in those days, nearly all the countries in Europe are being forced to join this conflict. So far, they are not fighting us in Ukraine directly, but, without their assistance, Ukraine would have been defeated a long time ago, and this Nazi regime would have ceased to exist.

As they keep pumping weapons into Ukraine, London and Paris (and especially their two leaders, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, respectively), echoed by the feeble voices of the Baltic nations and a few other countries, are now saying that, in addition to supplying weapons to Ukraine, they want to create something they call a “coalition of the willing.” They are talking about deploying some “peacekeeping mission” or a “security mission” to Ukraine once the war is over. . . .

Europe, led by Germany and specifically Ursula von der Leyen, is currently thinking about launching a massive rearmament program worth hundreds of billions of euros, even though it is in terrible shape economically and socially after the [former US president Joe] Biden administration dispatched Europeans to fight Russia. They are struggling with deindustrialization and lots of other problems.

That is part of the reason why they are so passionate when insisting that the West must not abandon Ukraine, that it must continue supplying weapons to Ukraine. They insist that nobody should so much as mention the idea that perhaps Ukraine should not be allowed to join NATO or the EU. French President Emmanuel Macron recently said as much. Their statements stand in stark contrast with what the Trump administration says. President Trump himself, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz have all clearly said that we are currently discussing the parameters of a final settlement. President Trump has clearly said that Ukraine should forget about joining NATO and that this issue should never have been brought up in the first place. President Biden made a huge mistake when he refused to listen to Russia. He insisted that Ukraine would one day become a NATO member, and in doing so, he created an unacceptable threat to Russia. Mike Waltz and President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff say that the territorial issue “is the key.” That’s because the territories where referendums have taken place have always been Russian – by culture, by language, by religion, by tradition, etc. The people who live there want to associate themselves with Russian culture, whereas the Kiev regime introduces new laws intended to outlaw Russian culture [see, for example, Vol. 71, No. 16‑17, pp. 3‑9 – Trans.].

President Putin mentioned the issue of rearmament recently. He said that weapons deliveries to Ukraine must stop. But the Europeans and Zelensky are refusing to do this. They are refusing to take a pause.