Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told American journalist Tucker Carlson about a previously unknown conversation with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken about Ukraine before the conflict began.
Lavrov said that he had not seen the US Secretary of State for a long time and that their last meeting took place on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Italy in 2021.
“Blinken’s aide came up to me during the meeting and said he wanted to talk for ten minutes. I left the room. We shook hands. He said something about the need to de-escalate,” the minister said.
According to TCN, he told Blinken that Russia does not want escalation, while the US wants to inflict a strategic defeat on it. At the same time, the US Secretary of State told him that this is not a strategic defeat on a global scale, but only in Ukraine.
Lavrov expressed hope that the US State Department secretary “will not be angry” with him for disclosing this information.
In October, Blinken reported that he attended Lavrov’s speech at the East Asia Summit in Laos. According to him, the sides “heard each other.”
Earlier, Zelensky stated that the Budapest Memorandum did not help Ukraine.
