The Belarusian track for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine is the main one, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following talks with his Ukrainian and Turkish counterparts Dmitry Kuleba and Mevlut Cavusoglu on Thursday.
"The conversation today confirmed that this [Belarusian] track has no alternatives," the Russian top diplomat said.
He noted that Russia agreed with the proposal by Turkish colleagues to hold talks with the Ukrainian side proceeding from the premise that Moscow "supports any contacts on issues lying at the foundation of the current Ukrainian crisis and on issues concerning the ways to resolve it."
"We indicated from the start that these contacts should have an added value," Lavrov emphasized. "We are proceeding from the premise that they won’t be used, above all, by our Ukrainian colleagues who are doing such things regularly in order to switch or devalue the real main negotiating track that is developing at the level of the two delegations in Belarus," he explained.
Lavrov noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin never says "no" to contacts, as long as these meetings are not held "for the sake of meetings themselves". Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier offered Putin to meet personally to discuss the Russian special operation in Ukraine, which he and his Western allies call an "invasion". The Kremlin has not yet confirmed that such talks are being organised, but the issue was raised during Lavrov's talks with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba in Turkey on 10 March.
The Russian foreign minister further stated that Moscow wants Ukraine to remain neutral and is ready to discuss security guarantees related to it – for Ukraine, European countries, and Russia itself. Lavrov added that Moscow wishes to see Ukraine as a friendly country that does not issue bans on Russian language and culture.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia was "outraged" by the experiments that the Pentagon conducted at bio laboratories in Ukraine. He said that American money was used to experiment on dangerous pathogens that could potentially be used in biological weapons.
"Of course, the Americans carried out their activities in deep secrecy. Just like they work in other states in the post-Soviet expanse, creating their military biological laboratories right along the borders of the Russian Federation, as well as China", he said.
Lavrov said that Russia currently does not have any information regarding the use of biological weapons by Ukraine, but insisted that the experiments conducted in the US-funded biolabs were not benign and were aimed at the creation of prohibited biological weapons, including "ethnically-oriented" ones.
