Russia Tells Trump: You Must Move First to Improve Ties

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Moscow will work with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration to improve relations on one condition: Washington must make the first move, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared Thursday.

Trump’s designated Ukraine envoy, highly decorated retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, told Fox News on Dec. 18 both sides were ready for peace talks and Trump was in a perfect position to execute a deal to end the war.

His confidence defies NATO which feels there is no point in the U.S. talking peace with Moscow because of the unintended consequences that will flow to its relationships with other hostile actors including Iran, China, and North Korea.

“If the signals that are coming from the new team in Washington to restore the dialogue that Washington interrupted after the start of a special military operation (war in Ukraine), are serious, of course, we will respond to them,” Lavrov told reporters in Moscow, Reuters reports.

“But the Americans broke (off) the dialogue, so they should make the first move,” Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister for over 20 years, told reporters in Moscow.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of dead, displaced millions of people and triggered the biggest rupture in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Lavrov said Russia saw no point in a weak ceasefire to freeze the war but Moscow wants a legally binding deal for a lasting peace that would ensure the security of both Russia and its neighbours, the Reuters report details.

“A truce is a path to nowhere,” Lavrov said.

“We need final legal agreements that will fix all the conditions for ensuring the security of the Russian Federation and, of course, the legitimate security interests of our neighbours,” Lavrov said.

He added Moscow wanted the legal documents drafted in such a way as to ensure “the impossibility of violating these agreements.”