The foreign minister has suggested that recent statements by France and the UK about the possibility are meant to heat up the conflict

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ©  Ramil Sitdikov;  RIA Novosti

Moscow is not considering the possibility of a NATO peacekeeping force being deployed to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a press conference in Qatar on Wednesday.

US President Donald Trump had previously claimed that he had discussed the issue of “some form of peacekeeping” with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Speaking after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump claimed that Putin had “no problem” with the idea as long as it’s “acceptable to everybody.”

Lavrov, however, stated that the Russian side has not been consulted on the matter.

“We cannot consider any options. I don’t know what Macron said, but Trump… said that the decision to deploy peacekeeping forces is possible only with the consent of both parties, apparently meaning us and Ukraine. No one has asked us about this,” Lavrov said.

He went on to say that the idea of deploying foreign troops to Ukraine is being pushed by “the Europeans, primarily France and also the British,” and suggested that this is being done to “further heat up the conflict and stop any attempts to calm it down.” 

Lavrov also claimed that the EU is intentionally seeking to derail the Ukraine peace process, pointing to Brussels’ recent announcement of new military aid packages for Kiev, as well as their continued encouragement for Ukrainian forces to keep fighting. He added that Macron’s demands to introduce an urgent ceasefire before negotiating any form of settlement of the conflict is “deceit” and only aims to “pump Ukraine with weapons again.” 

The foreign minister insisted that any discussions about a peacekeeping force in Ukraine are “empty” and that the main priority right now should be to resolve the underlying issues of the conflict – including the attempts to drag Kiev into NATO in order to deploy Western military infrastructure to the country which could be aimed at Russia.

 

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 EU trying to block Ukraine peace – Lavrov

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also dismissed Trump’s claim that Russia would accept NATO troops in Ukraine as part of a peace deal. He stressed that any sort of presence of armed forces from NATO countries, even under the EU flag, is “completely unacceptable.” 

Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has stated that Moscow would only ever accept a foreign troop deployment to Ukraine as part of a UN Security Council mandate. 

“’Peacekeepers’ cannot operate without a mandate from the UN Security Council,” he said in an interview earlier this month, adding that any other military contingents on the ground would be treated as regular combatants.