Moscow's First Diplomat: European Leaders Who Were Against the Ceasefire Now Have a Different Opinion

European leaders who were against the ceasefire in Ukraine have changed their minds, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, RIA Novosti reported.

"All sorts of Macrons, Starmers, Von der Leyen immediately started shouting that the ball is in Russian President Vladimir Putin's court. Although three days before that everyone was saying that there was no ceasefire, that it needed to "pump up" Ukraine, before sitting down at the negotiating table to act from a position of strength.

"They immediately changed their position as soon as the wind changed direction“, Lavrov commented.

He said that on the same day the ceasefire agreement was agreed, Kiev launched a record number of drones into central Russia, without the West condemning it.

Lavrov stressed that dialogue between Russia and the United States is necessary and represents a return to normality.

Sergey Lavrov said that the United States wants to establish a 'shuttle' diplomacy during the talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

"In the contacts before this meeting in Riyadh with Washington, it was felt that the Americans wanted to put the Ukrainians and the Russians in adjacent rooms and conduct shuttle diplomacy between them. And to issue some kind of unified statement", he said in an interview with Channel One of Russian television.

Lavrov said that former US President Joseph Biden had made a colossal mistake by insisting on Ukraine's membership in NATO and thus, as he assessed, "has abandoned dialogue with Russia and begun to pose a threat to it", the Russian portal RBC reports.

The head of Russian diplomacy pointed out that European leaders were showing incompetence when discussing the possibility of sending their peacekeeping forces to Ukraine and added that the Russian-American dialogue on strategic stability should be renewed.