RUSSIAN foreign minister in a press conference responded to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s earlier rejections to freeze the conflict amid Ukraine’s mounting losses.
It can be remembered that in an interview with German Media, Stoltenberg said that, peace cannot mean freezing the conflict and accepting a deal that is dictated by Russia, and only Ukraine can define the conditions that are acceptable.
“Peace cannot mean freezing the conflict and accepting a deal that is dictated by Russia.”
“Only Ukraine can define the conditions that are acceptable.”
“If NATO, through the mouth of Stoltenberg, once again declares that they are against freezing, as they say, the conflict in Ukraine, then they want to fight.”
“Well, let them fight. We are ready for this.”
“We have long understood the goals of [NATO] in the situation around Ukraine,” Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia said.
They were formed for many years after the coup d’état.
Now NATO is trying to implement them.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the ongoing conflict is pitting his forces against what he described as “the entire Western military machine.”
Lavrov likely said a similar thing during the press conference, saying that the continuous arms shipments of the West to Ukraine only show that the West is a direct participant in the hybrid war declared against Russia.
Meanwhile, Stoltenberg has said that Ukraine is now facing well-prepared and dug-in Russian forces and that Kyiv’s troops are facing a difficult terrain.
His words came as Ukraine sought to explain its lack of progress from its operation in the weeks since it started.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar, on the other hand, acknowledged the difficulties for Ukrainian troops to advance, and that Russian soldiers mounted their own offensive by seeking to reach the borders of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are partly under Russian control.
