Russia's ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, in an interview for "The Guardian" has said that Moscow would be within its right to launch a "counterattack" if it felt it needed to protect Russian citizens living in eastern Ukraine.
"We will not invade Ukraine unless we are provoked to do so. If the Ukrainians launch an attack against Russia, you should not be surprised if we strike back. Or, if they start openly killing Russian citizens anywhere in Donbas or anywhere.”
Donbass is the region of eastern Ukraine where the Kremlin has armed and financed an insurgency since 2014. It has also, in recent years, distributed hundreds of thousands of Russian passports to residents of the two so-called "people's republics," which have long gone unchecked. from Kiev.
More than 14,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 2014.
Russia has always denied that it is a party to the conflict, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Chizhov described claims that Russian troops were already in the Donbass region as a "lie" but warned that a sudden escalation of the conflict there, or a "Ukrainian provocation", could prompt action by the Kremlin.
"What I mean by provocation is that they can organize an incident against the self-proclaimed republics of Donbas, provoking them and then hitting them with all their forces, thereby provoking Russia to react to avoid humanitarian catastrophe in its limits".
The US government has claimed it has evidence that Moscow is planning exactly the kind of provocation that Chizhov said Kiev could launch. US officials went public last month with claims they had evidence of a plan to make a "very graphic" fake video of a Ukrainian attack. With about 145,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, US intelligence officials said over the weekend that Russia had accelerated plans for an invasion and could move troops across the border as soon as Wednesday.
Chizhov dismissed Western fears of an imminent conflict, saying the number of Russian troops on Ukraine's border was only equal to those of Zapad 21, a large-scale military exercise held last September.
Military analysts describe the scale and composition of the increase as unprecedented.
In a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to leave room for further negotiations.
"You have said, and other Russian representatives have said, that we warn against endless talks about issues that need to be resolved today. However, as Foreign Minister, I must say that there is always a chance," he told the Russian president.
"It seems to me that our possibilities are far from exhausted. They certainly don't have to go on indefinitely. But at this stage I would suggest that they continue and intensify", he added.
Chizhov said he believed the diplomatic impasse of recent weeks could still end in a solution that worked for all sides. The Kremlin is seeking to block Ukraine from future NATO membership, a demand rejected by the West, as well as start a discussion on a new security architecture for Europe. Chizhov said the West had a "sort of selective memory" for previous commitments to NATO expansion. He added that Lavrov had written to EU and NATO countries on February 1 citing the OSCE summit in Istanbul in November 1999, where it was agreed that all were obliged "not to strengthen its security in at the expense of the security of other countries".
The EU's foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, responded in a letter seen by the Guardian, in which he said: "We in the European Union are prepared to continue the dialogue with Russia on ways to strengthen its security to all".
Chizhov said he was unable to make Borrell's letter public, but that his overall assessment was that it was "unsatisfactory". He added that it was also surprising, given that Borrell had not been the recipient of Lavrov's communication. "We wanted to sound out of place," Chizhov said. "Well, they were too shy to respond in their national capacity."
(BalkanWeb)
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