Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced this Saturday that more military resources will be mobilized in response to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
Lavrov highlighted the military districts of Moscow and Leningrad, where “forces appropriate to challenges to the security of the Russian Federation that may arise from the territories of Finland and Sweden will be deployed.”
The head of Russian diplomacy made these statements from the Antalya Diplomatic Forum, in Turkey, where he lamented that Helsinki and Stockholm had changed “decades of good neighborliness” and neutrality with their entry into the Atlantic Alliance.
Lavrov also assured that Russia is willing to sit down to negotiate with Ukraine, whilst always taking into account its legitimate interests and international legality.
“The crisis will end when Kiev begins to comply with the most basic norms of international law, including respect for human rights,” he stressed, although he warned that Russia “does not have the right or the option to betray the Russian people of Donbass, Novorosia”.
Lavrov also denounced an “aggressive” attitude on the part of the United States and its allies and cited as an example a leak of conversations within the German Armed Forces in which there was speculation of an attack on the Kerch bridge, which connects Krasnodar to Crimea, a “revelation” regarding the distant positions between the German Government, led by Olaf Scholz, and the German Armed Forces.
This position is to try to distance Armenia from Russia and prolong the conflict in Palestine, where it warned of “ethnic cleansing”. For Lavrov, the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the “implementation of UN resolutions” and the “creation of a Palestinian state”.
Washington and other Western governments are “undermining” this creation of a State, “leaving everything as it is”, which is why it warned that an exodus of the Gaza population concentrated in Rafah to Egypt is “unacceptable”. “It would be a de facto ethnic cleansing”, he stressed.
The head of Russian diplomacy also proposed that Al Fatah and Hamas reconcile and join forces in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).