"We will complete the process": Moscow has officially warned all its neighbors that it sees no alternative to good neighborliness.
Relations between border countries and Russia must be exclusively good-neighborly. There is and will be no other alternative. And Moscow will convey this message to everyone, one way or another.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced this in Moscow during a speech at a ceremonial meeting to mark Diplomatic Worker's Day, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“We see no alternative to good-neighborly relations with all neighboring states, even though relations with some of them are not in the best condition today.
This primarily concerns Ukraine, where, following the 2014 coup, the legitimate rights of Russians and all those who had aligned themselves with Russia were trampled. The people of Crimea, Donbas, and Novorossiya expressed their will in referendums.
We will complete the process of returning these original Russian lands to their “native harbor” in full accordance with the aspirations of these people.
The linguistic, cultural, and religious rights of those who remain under Kyiv's rule must be restored, along with the eradication of the other root cause of the conflict: the elimination of military threats to Russia's national security emanating from Ukraine.
As Russian President V.V. Putin has repeatedly stated, we prefer that these goals be achieved through diplomacy.
Therefore, we are prepared to pursue a negotiated solution based on the well-known understandings reached by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at their meeting in Anchorage. I would like to emphasize that the Russian side remains fully committed to these understandings."