By Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn<\/p>\n
MOSCOW, June 24 (Reuters) – Russia wants to know if Donald Trump has really changed his stance on the Ukraine war after French President Emmanuel Macron suggested at this \u200cmonth’s G7 summit that the U.S. president had done so, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Macron, host \u200cof the G7 summit in the French town of Evian-les-Bains, said Trump had acknowledged during the talks there that Russia did not want peace \u200bin Ukraine and that this marked “a real change in approach” from the U.S.<\/p>\n
Trump himself urged Russia to make peace with Ukraine after having what he described as a “very good” meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, comments that sparked cautious optimism among G7 leaders that a peace deal could be struck.<\/p>\n
“As far as Ukraine is concerned, we want to understand what happened in \u200cEvian,” Lavrov said at an event in \u2060Moscow.<\/p>\n
“The Americans haven\u2019t yet told us what they took away from the summit in Evian or what their future course of action will be,” he said.<\/p>\n
Lavrov also quoted Macron as saying \u2060that understandings reached last August between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, had been “buried” at Evian.<\/p>\n
Russian officials regularly refer to the so-called “Spirit of Anchorage” – horthand, say analysts, for what Moscow interpreted as the basis for a possible agreement that would \u200bsee \u200bUkrainian forces withdraw from the remainder of the Donbas region of \u200beastern Ukraine in return for Moscow freezing the \u200cbattlelines elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Kyiv has repeatedly said it will not hand over any of its territory to Russia without a fight.<\/p>\n
RUSSIAN FRUSTRATION<\/p>\n
Underlining Moscow’s growing frustration with the situation, Lavrov suggested on Tuesday the Alaska summit may have been a “U.S. ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime”, while two other senior Russian officials also accused Washington this week of failing to deliver on the Anchorage “understandings”.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Lavrov said Putin had signed up to what the veteran diplomat said had been \u200ca U.S. proposal.<\/p>\n
“In Anchorage, he (Putin) told President Trump: \u2018There are certain nuances here, \u200bbut I\u2019ll take responsibility for them; I accept your proposals.\u2019 That \u200bwas already a compromise. And now they\u2019re telling us: \u2018Listen, \u200bit\u2019s not working out yet \u2013 let\u2019s come up with another concession.\u2019”<\/p>\n
Lavrov repeatedly stressed that Moscow \u200cwants to keep talking to the U.S. and was \u200blooking forward to hearing what \u200bTrump’s envoys – Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – had to say on their next visit to Moscow.<\/p>\n
However, he also complained about continued U.S. sanctions on Russia and lamented that the two countries had not even been able \u200bto resume direct flights or agree on \u200cthe return of Russian diplomatic property seized by the U.S. authorities.<\/p>\n
Nor, Lavrov added, was the U.S. \u200bplacing any limits on the weapons it sells to European countries for Ukraine.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov, Writing \u200bby Andrew Osborn and Alessandra Prentice Editing by Gareth Jones)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn MOSCOW, June 24 (Reuters) – Russia wants to know if Donald Trump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[43,207,2080,38,25,1966,1054,4413,26],"class_list":["post-9123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-g7-summit","tag-moscow","tag-russia","tag-russian-officials","tag-sanctions-on-russia","tag-sergei-lavrov","tag-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}