MOSCOW, Feb 10 (Reuters) – Russia’s international minister accused his British counterpart on Thursday of grandstanding and refusing to pay attention, at a rancorous encounter that highlighted the gulf between them over the Ukraine disaster.
Sergei Lavrov informed a joint information convention with Britain’s Liz Truss that their assembly had felt like a dialog between mute and deaf individuals.
“They are saying Russia is ready till the bottom freezes like a stone so its tanks can simply cross into Ukrainian territory,” he stated. “I feel the bottom was like that at the moment with our British colleagues, from which quite a few information that we produced bounced off.”
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Truss challenged Lavrov immediately over his assertion that Russia shouldn’t be threatening anybody with its build-up of troops and weaponry close to Ukraine’s borders.
“I am unable to see some other purpose for having 100,000 troops stationed on the border, aside from to threaten Ukraine. And if Russia is critical about diplomacy, they should take away these troops and desist from the threats,” she stated.
Lavrov stated it was regrettable that Russia was being requested to withdraw troops from its personal territory.
Russia’s Kommersant newspaper quoted two diplomatic sources as saying that in their earlier closed-door assembly Lavrov had requested Truss if she recognised Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh – two areas within the south of the nation the place Russia has been build up its forces.
Kommersant stated Truss replied that Britain would by no means recognise them as Russian, and needed to be corrected by her ambassador.
In a later interview with one other Russian paper, RBC, Truss stated she had mistakenly thought Lavrov was referring to areas of Ukraine.
Russia has introduced the West with a collection of calls for to ensure its safety, complaining it feels threatened by repeated waves of NATO enlargement and the refusal of the alliance to rule out membership for its neighbour Ukraine, a fellow former Soviet republic.
“Nobody is undermining Russia’s safety – that’s merely not true,” Truss stated, including that it was “completely correct” for Ukraine to defend itself and search alliances.
Russia and Britain have had dire relations for years, hitting low factors with the deadly 2006 poisoning of former Russian safety officer Alexander Litvinenko in London and the tried killing of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent within the English metropolis of Salisbury in 2018.
Lavrov stated London had by no means introduced any information to assist its accusations of Russian involvement in each circumstances, or within the tried poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in 2020.
He stated Truss had not various her tone all through their two-hour assembly, and had ignored his explanations whereas repeating statements and calls for that Britain had made earlier than.
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Extra reporting by Tom Balmforth; Writing by Mark Trevelyan
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