TANZANIA – As new tensions rise between Russia and NATO powers, Moscow's top diplomat insisted to world leaders Saturday that his nation doesn't intend to attack Europe but will mount a “decisive response” to any aggression.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke at the U.N. General Assembly after weeks in which unauthorized flights into NATO’s airspace — intrusions the alliance blames on Russia — have raised alarm around Europe, particularly after NATO jets downed drones over Poland and Estonia said Russian fighter jets flew into its territory and lingered for 12 minutes.
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Russia has denied that its planes entered Estonian airspace and has said the drones didn’t target Poland, with Moscow’s ally Belarus maintaining that Ukrainian signal-jamming sent the devices off course.
But European leaders see the incidents as intentional, provocative moves meant to rattle NATO and to suss how the alliance will respond. The alliance warned Russia this week that NATO would use all means to defend against any further breaches of its airspace.
At the U.N., Lavrov maintained it’s Russia that’s facing threats.
“Russia has never had and does not have any such intentions” of attacking European or NATO countries, he said. “However, any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response. There should be no doubt about this among those in NATO and the EU."
Speaking three years into the Ukraine war
Lavrov spoke three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that the international community has broadly deplored.
U.S. President Donald Trump said this week that he believed Ukraine can win back all the territory it has lost to Russia. It was a notable tone shift from a U.S. leader who had previously suggested Ukraine would need to make some concessions and could never reclaim all the areas Russia has occupied since seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launching a full-scale invasion in 2022.
Just three weeks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country and the U.S. had a “mutual understanding” and that Trump's administration "is listening to us.” Trump and Putin held a summit in Alaska in early August but left without a deal to end the war.
Sounding a notably open note from a country that has often lambasted the West, Lavrov noted the summit and said Russia had “some hopes” to keep talking with the United States.
“In the approaches of the current U.S. administration, we see a desire not only to contribute to ways to realistically resolve the Ukrainian crisis, but also a desire to develop pragmatic cooperation without adopting an ideological stance,” the diplomat said, portraying the powers as counterparts of sorts: “Russia and the U.S. bear a special responsibility for the state of affairs in the world, and for avoiding risks that could plunge humanity into a new war.”
To be sure, Lavrov still had sharp words for NATO, an alliance that includes the U.S., and for the West in general and the European Union.
Trump's emerging view of Ukraine is part of the equation
Trump's new view of Ukraine's prospects came after he met with its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the sidelines of General Assembly on Tuesday — seven months after a televised blow-up between the two in the Oval Office. This time, the doors were closed, and the tenor was evidently different — "a good meeting,” as Zelenskyy described it in his assembly speech the next day.
For the fourth year in a row, Zelenskyy appealed to the gathering of presidents, prime ministers and other top officials to get Russia out of his country — and warned that inaction would put other countries at risk.
“Ukraine is only the first," he said.
Russia has offered various explanations for the Ukraine war, among them ensuring Russia's its own security after NATO expanded eastward over the years and drew closer with Ukraine after Russia's move into Crimea. Russia also has said its offensive was meant to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine and the West have denounced Russia's invastion as an unprovoked act of aggression.
Addressing the devastating war in Gaza, Lavrov condemned Hamas militants' surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but said “there is no justification” for Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians, including children.
The Hamas attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel; 251 were taken hostage. Israel’s sweeping offensive has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not give a breakdown of civilian and combatant deaths but says around half of those killed were women and children.
Lavrov also said there is no basis for any potential Israeli annexation of the West Bank, which Palestinians consider a key part of their future state, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem.
Israel hasn’t announced such a move, but several leading members in Netanyahu’s government have advocated doing so. Officials recently approved a controversial settlement project that would effectively cut the West Bank in two, a move critics say could doom chances for a Palestinian state.
Between the Gaza war and the situation in the West Bank, “we are essentially dealing with an attempt at a kind of coup d’etat aimed at burying U.N. decisions on the creation of a Palestinian state,” Lavrov said.
The international community has long embraced a “two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, saying it would reward Hamas — a position he reiterated Friday at the General Assembly.