{"id":370462,"date":"2025-08-24T19:24:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T19:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/370462\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T19:24:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T19:24:13","slug":"russia-says-europes-leaders-dont-want-peace-in-ukraine-as-vance-says-us-will-keep-trying-us-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/370462\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia says Europe\u2019s leaders don\u2019t want peace in Ukraine as Vance says US will keep trying | US foreign policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russia accused western European leaders on Sunday of not wanting peace in Ukraine, as Moscow\u2019s most senior diplomat praised efforts by Donald Trump<\/a> to end the war, while Vice-President JD Vance said the US would \u201ckeep on trying\u201d to broker talks in the absence of a deal.<\/p>\n

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made the comments during a sometimes contentious interview on NBC on Sunday morning, during which he denied his country had bombed civilian targets in Ukraine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump, he said, had set himself above European leaders who accompanied Ukraine\u2019s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy<\/a> for talks at the White House<\/a> last week, immediately after the summit<\/a> between the US president and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want peace in Ukraine. He wants, President Trump wants, peace in Ukraine. The reaction to [the] Anchorage meeting, the gathering in Washington of these European representatives and what they were doing after Washington, indicates that they don\u2019t want peace,\u201d Lavrov said.<\/p>\n

The Alaska talks produced neither a ceasefire nor an agreement for Zelenskyy and Putin to meet, and was widely considered to be a public relations triumph<\/a> for the Russian leader.<\/p>\n

Lavrov brushed aside Trump\u2019s apparent frustration at the outcome and the US warning of \u201cmassive sanctions or massive tariffs or both<\/a>\u201d against Moscow. He said \u201cyes\u201d when asked if Putin wanted peace and said Putin and Trump respected each other, while assailing the alliance<\/a> of leaders such as France\u2019s Emmanuel Macron, Germany\u2019s Friedrich Merz, Britain\u2019s Keir Starmer and European Union president Ursula von der Leyen who came to the White House last week to bolster<\/a> Zelenskyy\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n

European leaders in recent days have pledged to support security guarantees as part of a peace agreement, although Russia has flatly rejected<\/a> the prospect of troops from countries in Europe being positioned in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Trump has ruled out sending the US military<\/a>, and on Friday it was reported that his administration had blocked Ukraine\u2019s use<\/a> of US-supplied long-range missiles to attack Russia.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney told Zelenskyy on Sunday that he backed Ukraine\u2019s calls for robust security guarantees and that Canada would not rule out sending troops.<\/p>\n

Earlier, Lavrov became defensive when NBC asked him if Putin was \u201cstringing along\u201d Trump by appearing conciliatory to his peace overtures but continuing to bomb Ukraine, attacks which last week included an airstrike on an American electronics manufacturing company<\/a> in the west of the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not for the lawmakers or for any media outlet to decide what President Trump is motivated by. We respect President Trump because President Trump defends American national interests. And I have reason to believe that President Trump respects President Putin because he defends Russian national interests,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Critics, including some conservative voices, are alarmed<\/a> by what they see as Putin manipulating Trump over Ukraine and US elections.<\/p>\n

Lavrov meanwhile denied that Russia attacks civilian targets including schools, hospitals and churches, hinting at Russia\u2019s extraordinary claims throughout the war that Ukraine is attacking its own people.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur intelligence has very good information, and we target only military enterprises, military sites or industrial enterprises directly involved in producing military equipment for [the] Ukrainian army,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Vance appeared separately in the same Sunday morning program and insisted Russia deserved credit for indicating it was ready to end a conflict that Trump has said more than 50 times<\/a> he would solve \u201cin one day\u201d, while in contrast the vice-president warned of a longer process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in three and a half years of this conflict,\u201d Vance said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve recognized that they\u2019re not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kyiv. That was, of course, a major demand at the beginning. And importantly, they\u2019ve acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vance said historically that peace negotiations go \u201cin fits and starts\u201d and warned that he did not think ending the war was \u201cgoing to happen overnight\u201d.<\/p>\n

Vance said of Russia, in a comment that was not further clarified: \u201cShould they have started the war? Of course, they haven\u2019t. But we\u2019re making progress\u201d. Trump in February blamed Ukraine<\/a>, saying, \u201cyou never should have started it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any sanctions against Russia, Vance said, would be on a \u201ccase by case basis\u201d, but he remained hopeful that US efforts could bring Zelenskyy and Putin together.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s complicated, but we\u2019re going to keep on trying to convince these parties to talk to each other and continue to play the game of diplomacy, because that\u2019s the only way to get this thing wrapped up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lavrov remained adamant that Russia also wanted peace, and acknowledged \u201cUkraine has the right to exist\u201d. But he said it \u201cmust let people go\u201d, referring to Putin\u2019s demand that it give up Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russia in 2014, as well as southern and eastern parts, such as the Donbas, captured since 2022, as part of a peace agreement.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Crimea [they] decided that they belong to the Russian culture,\u201d he said, citing a disputed 2014 referendum<\/a> condemned by most of the world as illegal.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat of Connecticut, said on CNN that stronger US action was needed because \u201cPutin is not going to stop until we stop him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia accused western European leaders on Sunday of not wanting peace in Ukraine, as Moscow\u2019s most senior diplomat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[332],"class_list":{"0":"post-370462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-russia"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115085381719952619","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}