Ukraine security talks are ‘road to nowhere’ says Lavrov

August 21, 2025 by Our Reporter

FILE PHOTO: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov speaks to the media on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, November 13, 2022. Russian Foreign Ministry/Handout via REUTERS

• NATO chiefs meet

NATO defence chiefs held a “candid discussion” yesterday about what security guarantees they could offer Ukraine – as Russia warned that any talks without its participation were a “road to nowhere”.

Italian admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of NATO’s military committee, said that 32 defence chiefs from across the alliance held a video conference amid a diplomatic push to end the fighting.

He said there was a “great, candid discussion” in the call. “We are united, and that unity was truly tangible today, as always,” he said.

Assurances that it won’t be invaded again in the future are one of the keys for getting Ukraine to sign up for a peace deal with Russia. It wants Western help for its military, including weapons and training, to shore up its defences, and Western officials are scrambling to figure out what commitments they might offer.

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But, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed efforts to work on security arrangements in Ukraine without Moscow’s involvement.

“We cannot agree with the fact that it is now proposed to resolve collective security issues without the Russian Federation. This will not work,” he said.

He also criticised the role of European leaders who met Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Monday.

Lavrov said Russia was in favour of “truly reliable” guarantees for Ukraine and suggested these could be modelled on a draft accord that was discussed between the warring parties in Istanbul in 2022, in the early weeks of the war.

At the time, Kyiv rejected that proposal on the grounds that Moscow would have held effective veto power over any military response to come to its aid.