The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken refuses all contact with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, during this week’s OSCE Ministerial Council meeting in Skopjea North American official indicated.
“There will be no interaction with the Russian Federation. (…) Russia is totally isolated,” assured Michael Carpenter, US Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in statements to Efe news agency, adding that Moscow only has the support of Belarus due to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The ambassador stated that his country will not accept that people act “as if nothing happened” and that “there can be no normalization of cruelty”.
Carpenter thanked Malta for its offer to assume the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE in 2024, a solution that avoided the risk of a blockage in the organization’s functioning due to Russia’s refusal to allow Estonia, a member of the EU and NATO, to exercise that role.
The diplomat also admitted the extension of the mandates of OSCE Secretary General Helga Schmid and three other leaders of the organization, which Russia refuses to re-elect as a bloc.
The heads of diplomacy of Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have already announced that they will not attend the meeting in protest against Lavrov’s presence.
The head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, was invited to the gala dinner that took place on Wednesday, ahead of the formal start of the meeting on Thursday and Friday.
On Monday, Lavrov announced that he plans to travel to the capital of North Macedonia to participate in the conference, his first trip to a NATO country since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces.
Russia is one of the 57 members of the OSCE, which was founded in 1975 during the Cold War to reduce tensions between East and West.
Lavrov said his office has received requests for bilateral meetings with several foreign ministers from other countries planning to travel to Skopje. “Of course I’m going to meet everyone,” he said.
His deputy minister, Sergei Ryabkov, added at the time that Lavrov had no plans to meet his North American counterpart Antony Blinken, who was also expected at the organization’s summit.
Lavrov argued that the security situation in Europe today is more dangerous than ever during the Cold War. In the past, he noted, the Soviet Union, the United States and their NATO allies were determined to “maintain their rivalry in political and diplomatic practices” and never “expressed serious concerns about their future , their physical future’, as they do now. .
Source: DN
