On February 21, at the initiative of the German side, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a telephone conversation with Federal Foreign Minister of Germany A. Berbock.
In the context of the talks held on February 15, 2022 in Moscow between President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and Federal Chancellor of Germany O. Scholz, the foreign ministers continued to exchange views on key aspects of the international agenda today.
With regard to the situation in the south-east of Ukraine, Sergey Lavrov stressed that Kiev is responsible for escalating the escalation on the contact line in Donbass and the armed provocations that have become more frequent in this regard, which have already served as an impetus for the humanitarian evacuation of the civilian population of the unrecognized republics to Russia. Sergey Lavrov again called on the German side, as a participant in the Normandy format, to exert maximum influence on the Ukrainian authorities in order to encourage them to take a more constructive position. It was stated that the implementation of the Minsk Agreements remains the only way to achieve a long-term and sustainable settlement of the internal Ukrainian conflict.
Some issues of the bilateral agenda of Russian-German relations were touched upon, including the discriminatory actions of the German government against the RT channel in German, as well as the prospects of the Russian-German public Forum “Petersburg Dialogue”, whose activities are blocked by the German side.
