Russia ready to ‘show flexibility’ on Trump’s Ukraine proposals – Lavrov

Vladimir Zelensky has so far rejected every point the US president has raised, the Russian foreign minister has said

Moscow has agreed to consider a number of US President Donald Trump’s proposals to resolve the Ukraine conflict, but Vladimir Zelensky has rejected them all, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with NBC News on Friday.

Trump put forward the initiatives following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week, Lavrov said.

“President Trump suggested after Anchorage several points which we share, and on some of them we agreed to show some flexibility,” Lavrov told NBC.

According to the top diplomat, Trump brought up the proposals in his meeting with Zelensky and some of his Western European backers in Washington on Monday.

He clearly indicated, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no NATO membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelensky said no to everything.

Lavrov added that the Ukrainian leader has also refused to rescind “legislation prohibiting the Russian language.”

“Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit,” he said, but added that as things stand, “there is no meeting planned.”

Trump suggested that the next stage of peace negotiations should be a one-on-one meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders before a potential trilateral peace summit. Zelensky “has to show some flexibility,” he told Fox News on Tuesday.

On Thursday, however, Lavrov said that Kiev is showing no interest in a sustainable peace with Moscow. He pointed to statements made by Zelensky aide Mikhail Podoliak, who said that Ukraine would seek to regain any territories “de facto” left to Russia in a peace deal, and that Kiev would seek to join a military alliance, if not NATO.

According to Lavrov, these goals are at odds with the joint peace efforts being undertaken by Putin and Trump.

Moscow has long insisted on a peace agreement that eradicates the underlying causes of the conflict. It has demanded that Ukraine maintain neutrality, stay out of NATO and other military alliances, demilitarize and denazify, as well as accept the new territorial reality.

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