Russia: It’s up to Trump team to make first move to improve ties

By Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia is willing to work with Donald Trump’s incoming administration to improve relations if the U.S. has serious intentions to do so but it is up to Washington to make the first move, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.

Trump, who will return as U.S. president on Jan. 20, styles himself as a master dealmaker and has vowed to swiftly end the war in Ukraine but not set out how he might achieve that beyond getting President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian counterpart President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to agree to end the fighting.

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

“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.

“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.

U.S. officials cast Russia as a corrupt autocracy that is the biggest nation-state threat to the United States and has meddled in U.S. elections, jailed U.S. citizens on false charges and perpetrated sabotage campaigns against U.S. allies.

Russian officials say the U.S. is a declining power that has repeatedly ignored Russia’s interests since the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, while sowing discord inside Russia in an attempt to divide Russian society and further U.S. interests.

PEACE IN UKRAINE

Reuters reported last month that Putin is open to discussing a Ukraine ceasefire deal with Trump but rules out making any major territorial concessions and insists Kyiv abandon ambitions to join NATO. Russia holds about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

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.

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

Putin says an arrogant West led by the United States ignored Russia’s post-Soviet interests, tried to pull Ukraine into its orbit since 2014 and then used Ukraine to fight a proxy war aimed at weakening – and ultimately destroying – Russia.

After a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution aimed at closer Western ties, Russia annexed the Crimea region and began giving military support to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The West says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an imperial-style land grab by Moscow that has strengthened the NATO military alliance and weakened Russia.

Ukraine’s Zelenskiy said on Sunday that its membership of NATO is “achievable”, but that Kyiv will have to fight to persuade Western allies to make it happen.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Antonov; editing by Mark Heinrich)