Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia is ready to cooperate with Donald Trump’s new administration to improve bilateral relations if the US genuinely intends to do so, but it is up to Washington to make the first step.
As part of his return as president of the United States on January 20, Trump viewed himself as a master dealmaker and vowed to end the war in Ukraine hastily. However, he did not set out how he might achieve this beyond getting President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, President Volodymyr Zelensky, to agree on ending the fighting.
Mr. Trump’s designated Ukraine envoy, retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, told Fox News on 18 December that both sides were ready for peace talks and that Mr. Trump was in a perfect position to execute a deal to end the war.
“If the signals 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,” Mr Lavrov told reporters in Moscow.
But the Americans broke (off) the dialogue, so they should make the first move,” said Mr Lavrov, Mr Putin’s foreign minister for over 20 years.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands dead, displaced millions of people, and triggered the biggest rupture in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
US officials portray Russia as the corrupt autocracy that poses the biggest threat to the US nation-state and interferes in the US elections, jails US citizens under false charges, and orchestrates sabotage campaigns against US allies.
Russian officials describe the US as a power that is in decline and has repeatedly ignored Russia’s interests since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 while sowing discord inside Russia to divide Russian society and further US interests.
