Ukraine said on Tuesday that the country’s Foreign Minister intends to boycott an OSCE meeting in North Macedonia this week because Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will take part in it for the first time since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began.
Earlier, Lavrov said that he would take part in the meeting if Bulgaria opens its airspace for him. According to him, some Western countries have asked for a meeting with him.
Let us recall that Bulgarian airspace is closed to Russian aircraft after the European Union imposed sanctions against Moscow in response to the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
“The Ukrainian delegation will not participate in the OSCE ministerial meeting at the level of the minister of foreign affairs,” Oleh Nikolenko, press secretary of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said on Facebook.
A ministerial meeting of the 57-nation OSCE is due to take place in Skopje from November 30 to December 1.
In his statement, Nikolenko noted that Russia abused the consensus rules in force in the organization, resorting to blackmail and open threats. He also stated that Moscow has been holding three Ukrainian representatives of the OSCE in custody for 500 days.
“In such conditions, the presence of a Russian delegation… at minister-level for the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine will only deepen the crisis into which Russia has driven the OSCE,” Nikolenko emphasized, Reuters published.
On the same day, the foreign ministers of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also announced their intention to boycott the OSCE meeting in Skopje due to the decision taken on the admissibility of the participation of the Russian Foreign Minister in it.
According to them, the presence of Sergei Lavrov at the meeting will give Moscow the opportunity to conduct propaganda and carries the risk of legitimizing the aggressor country “as a legitimate member of our community of free nations.”
