The foreign minister has spoken to Russia's Channel 1 following the latest round of marathon negotiations with the US in Saudi Arabia

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressed a wide range of global issues in an interview that aired early Wednesday on Russia's Channel 1, following a marathon 12-hour negotiation session between Russian and American officials in Riyadh earlier this week.

He noted what he viewed as encouraging signals from US President Donald Trump and his administration, while criticizing Western governments for allegedly attempting to hinder progress toward a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. Below is the full text of the interview:


Question: Let us begin with your birthday. You have received plenty of birthday wishes. There was even a "marathon" of your wonderful verses. Did you have time to look and read all that and answer to everyone?

Sergey Lavrov: I am deeply moved by what I have heard, seen and received through various information channels.

I would like to say thank you to everyone. However, it is impossible to do so, which is why our today's meeting is very fortunate.

Before proceeding to the political part of our conversation, I would like, with your permission and with the permission of Channel One, whose good services we use on a regular basis, to express my gratitude to all those who remembered my birth anniversary, those who did not just call to congratulate me, but put their hearts into reciting my modest poems, adding some of their lyrical, humorous and many other 'finds.'

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to President Vladimir Putin for his high appreciation of my work, to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, to the leadership of the Federal Assembly and to ministers - my colleagues, deputies and senators, as well as to the heads of the media, including, of course, Channel One and our other partners such as Rossiya 1, Rossiya 24, TV Centre, and NTV - the channels where we frequently speak to convey to our citizens the essence of what is taking place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and what we are achieving on the global stage.

I was also happy to receive birthday greetings from TNT TV channel, which had not invited me but they congratulated me nonetheless, as well as from leaders of sports movements, civil society in its various facets, and of course, my colleagues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is impossible to list them all; I have a thick folder on my desk and a lot of materials on my phone. If I have a free moment, I will definitely and gladly look through everything. But I would like to take this opportunity to thank, through you, all those who have marked and noticed my birthday anniversary.

Question: Talks in Riyadh are important. What was their objective and what is the outcome? Please share your thoughts on this.

Sergey Lavrov: The outcome is that the preliminary results are now being reported to President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump. As the presidents agreed earlier, the participants focused primarily on safe navigation in the Black Sea. This is not the first time they are trying to address this matter.

The first attempt dates back to July 2022. Back then, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and President of Trkiye Recep Tayyip Erdogan mediated with the specialists who represented the Ukrainian and Russian entities in question and came to terms on a certain package that was made up of two parts. The first part provided fast-track solutions to shipping Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea via the straits that included ship inspections to preclude cheating where empty runs for a new batch of grain could be used to deliver weapons.

Inspection procedures have been agreed upon and remained operational for the entire year. However, we were then forced to suspend the process, at least to pause it, because the second part of the deal that concerned removal of all obstacles to Russian grain and fertiliser exports was flat-out sabotaged. All ships that carried Russian agricultural products, including fertiliser, have been blacklisted. Lloyd's, the insurer, has hiked up the rates. Payments for our products were impeded as well. Rosselkhozbank was disconnected from SWIFT. Much was done to send prices sky high. European farmers created unfair competition. However, our Western colleagues acted in a biased manner and dumped substandard Ukrainian grain on European markets.

The West was doing everything to skew the rules in favour of Ukraine and to punish the Russian Federation as much as it could.

A year after the Black Sea Initiative had taken effect, UN Secretary-General Guterres threw up his hands and said that he was unable to get things right. We suggested getting back to this deal whenever he regains this ability. We just bailed out from the Ukraine side of the deal which was approved to last one year. The year ran out. We did not renew that deal. The Memorandum of Understanding between the Russian Federation and the Secretariat of the United Nations on promoting Russian food products and fertiliser to the world markets - Russian grain and fertiliser exports make up a much larger share of the world markets than Ukrainian - will remain in effect through July 2025.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and his representatives maintain contacts with us at all times and are trying to help. However, they are not trying to have sanctions imposed on us lifted, and are nor demanding that the West - if it genuinely wants to advance the interests of developing countries, the Global Majority, primarily Africa - cancel its discriminatory food security policies.

UN Secretary-General Guterres chose another path and started looking for loopholes in the Western sanctions without demanding to lift them altogether. Moreover, in fact, he did so while complying with these sanctions and acting upon them, which is absolutely unacceptable for any UN official, even more so for the Secretary-General. The UN Charter says that no member of the UN Secretariat, including the Secretary-General and his deputies, can receive directives from any government. If the UN Secretary-General is looking for loopholes with regard to sanctions, thus recognising that they exist, he is, in fact, acting upon the decisions that are made in the capitals of UN member states, which is something he cannot do.

That is why our negotiators in Riyadh, who were assigned for this mission by President Putin, reminded their US counterparts of this incident and said that, given Ukraine's track record and the Black Sea incident in question, we would like to leave ambiguity out of whatever agreement we may reach this time.

We also noted that when the Ukrainian part of the initiative expired in 2023, and we withdrew from it, President of Trkiye Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to renew it on two or three occasions. A year ago, he asked for our support to fast-track the renewal of the initiative without conducting physical inspections of empty ships after grain and fertiliser get unloaded. We were willing to meet them halfway even then. Then, at the last moment, President Erdogan said Vladimir. Zelensky still wanted to reach an agreement on not targeting nuclear infrastructure facilities, even though Zelensky was the only one to attack Zaporozhskaya Nuclear Power Plant. Considering the fact that this proposal came from Kiev, we agreed to it without recurring to any special verification mechanisms this time again. In other words, we met all President Erdogan's requests, including the one that Zelensky slipped to him at the last moment for purposes that remain unknown. We agreed to it. Later, President Erdogan called President Putin and said Zelensky had a change of heart.

Every time a ceasefire was declared, Ukraine agreed to it solely because it found itself in desperate straits on the battlefield at that particular historical moment. A few weeks or a couple of months into the ceasefire, they grossly violated it. This is how things were throughout time the Minsk Accords were in effect.

That is why this time we need clear, concrete, verifiable, and workable guarantees and mechanisms. As President Putin said at a news conference with President of Belarus Lukashenko a few days ago, he was supportive of President Trump's initiative to declare a ceasefire for 30 days, not just a moratorium on strikes on energy infrastructure or on maritime infrastructure in the Black Sea. He said we are all for it. However, considering the length of the contact line, the ability of the Ukrainian military to stage provocations...

Recently, they attacked the Sudzha gas metering station and claimed Russia did it, even though the station is our property, and a number of European countries largely depend on it for uninterrupted energy supplies. It is impossible to do so now, just as it is impossible to use the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, in which Kazakhstan and the United States have business interests. One of its pumping stations - Kropotkinskaya - has come under attack. The damage it sustained cannot be undone quickly. The volume of oil pumped to European households will drop dramatically because of this terrorist attack by the Ukrainians.

President Vladimir Putin said Russia was in favour of a ceasefire, but there were nuances such as who would make sure that the Nazi regime in Kiev cleans up its act. We are also in favour of exploring ways to prevent causing any damage to the energy infrastructure which is not in our interest. As the President said, we are in favour of resuming the Black Sea Initiative in a more acceptable form, and it was discussed in Riyadh as a top priority.

Our position is straightforward, and I have just outlined it in broad strokes. We cannot take this individual's word for it. We want the grain and fertiliser market to be predictable, so that no one tries to make us leave it. It's not only because we want/wanted to generate a legitimate revenue in fair competition, but also because we are concerned about food security in Africa and other countries in the Global South and Global East that are impacted by the West's unscrupulous competition tricks. Prices there are quite reasonable, but they could have been much lower if the West stopped interfering in the free play of market forces that it worshipped when it lured us all into this "realm of globalisation and freedom."

As I mentioned earlier, we will need clear-cut guarantees. Given the disappointing experiences of our past agreements with Kiev, the guarantees can only exist in the form of a directive coming from Washington to Zelensky and his team to do so and so and not otherwise.

I think our US partners are receptive of this signal. They realise that Washington is the only party that can achieve positive results in putting an end to the terrorist attacks and the shelling of civilian energy infrastructure that is unrelated to the defence industry.

Europe went down a completely different path. Like in the times of Napoleon and Hitler, the times of the Crimean War, it is eager to inflict a "strategic defeat" on our country. As back in those years, almost all European countries with few exceptions are involved in the war effort. They are not yet physically fighting against us in Ukraine, but, without them, Ukraine would have been defeated, and the Nazi regime would have ceased to exist a long time ago.

As they continue to flood Kiev with weapons, London and Paris - especially its two leaders, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron - backed up by a not too strong coalition of the Baltic states and a number of other countries, keep talking about shipping weapons to Ukraine as they did before, and are even talking about forming a "coalition of the willing" and deploying a "peacekeeping mission" or a "mission to ensure Ukraine's security" after the war is over. Or, even two missions where one would be put on the border with the EU and NATO, and the other one would be formed from the countries of the Global South, such as India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and even China. However, these "dreamers" make their abysmal political failure clear with every passing day. They are willing to not just "contain" Russia, but to inflict a "defeat" on it. Someone even said Vladimir Putin must be put to shame. Historians may correct me, but I have a sense that we have already seen this before with Napoleon and Hitler who entertained similar goals. To realise these goals, the whole Europe was conquered by Napoleon and Hitler. In this particular instance, the whole of Europe has been mobilised.

Europe, led by Germany - starting with Ursula von der Leyen and everyone else on that list - is beginning to seriously ponder remilitarisation that will set them back outlandish amounts running into hundreds of billions of euros in a situation where its economy and social sphere are circling the drain after the Biden administration let them off the leash and sent them to wage war against the Russian Federation. They face decentralisation and an inordinate number of ensuing problems.

This partly accounts for why they are so adamant about not "surrendering" Ukraine, continuing to arm it, and are demanding that rhetoric about Ukraine not ever joining NATO or the EU be prohibited. French President Macron recently made a statement that runs counter to where the Trump Administration stands. The President himself, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz have made it clear that the preliminary discussion of the parameters of the final settlement was underway. President Trump also made it clear that NATO was out of question and there was no point in bringing that issue up. President Biden made a huge mistake when he refused to listen to what Russia had to say and insisted that Ukraine would join NATO, thus creating unacceptable threats. Michael Waltz and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said that territory issues are "the key," because the territories where the referendums were held have always been Russian in terms of culture, language, religion, and traditions. People want to be associated with Russian culture which the Kiev regime is legislatively exterminating.

Arming Ukraine, which President Putin mentioned, must be stopped. Meanwhile, Europe and Vladimir Zelensky are saying no to that and claim they will not take a pause.

READ MORE: Western support won't secure victory for Kiev - US intelligence

Question: Can the United States and the Trump administration influence Europe today? Why is nothing happening?

Sergey Lavrov: Both President Trump and his team made it clear that certain issues were off-limits. Territorial matters must be discussed - not just as a question of land, but because they involve the people who live there and who have chosen to link their future with Russia. It was also stated that no weapons should be supplied there.

On all three points, President Zelensky himself acted defiantly. After insulting Donald Trump at the White House, he went to London, where he was warmly received. Upon returning to Kiev, he made a series of bold statements, rejecting both neutral status and any discussion of territorial issues. His stance was essentially: "Give us everything."

And what does that mean? It means banning everything Russian - outlawing the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is a sister church of the Russian Orthodox Church, suppressing Russian media and education. Now, the Rada is even considering a bill to forbid speaking Russian during school breaks - it was already banned in lessons. And yet, they expect to reintegrate people who, in a referendum, declared that they are Russian. These people say: If we had been granted our rights, we would have remained Russian citizens of Ukraine. But instead, you are trying to eradicate us - both physically and legally.

In this situation, Europe is not only disregarding Donald Trump and his team's assessment that territorial issues must be resolved outside NATO's influence - it is actively encouraging Zelensky's stance. When European leaders speak of "peacekeeping forces" or "security forces," they are essentially seeking to secure control over the territories Kiev currently holds, or will hold by the time any agreement is reached, placing them under British or French oversight.

No one acknowledges that in the regions that have returned or are in the process of returning to Russia, linguistic, educational and cultural rights are fully protected for Russians as well as for national minorities. Meanwhile, if what remains of Ukraine falls under the control of NATO-backed security forces, regardless of the flag they operate under, no one is talking about strengthening democracy there. No one is calling for the repeal of racist, Russophobic laws that seek to erase Russian identity.

If that's the case, then these so-called security forces will only serve to perpetuate a Nazi regime, one that bans anything reminiscent of Ukraine's Russian heritage, despite the fact that the country itself was created by Russians.

Question: What is the worth of such agreements, if an oil depot in Kuban was attacked immediately after President Putin accepted President Trump's proposal to halt attacks on energy infrastructure for 30 days, which we were not doing anyway? It looks like a vicious circle. How much can we take? The attack took place a day after the presidents' conversation.

Sergey Lavrov: There are many more examples of this kind. I used to say that the Kiev regime does not honour agreements. More than that, these "characters" do not just disregard agreements but have demonstrated a new quality, complementing a desire to cheat with the intention to openly, publicly and spitefully play nasty tricks in direct contravention to what they have been asked and seemingly agreed to do.

On March 11, 2025, the Kiev regime stated in Jeddah for the first time that it accepted a 30-day ceasefire. It immediately shifted responsibility to Russia, saying that we must accept the initiative immediately and implicitly. People like Macron, Starmer and von der Leyen shouted that the ball was in President Putin's court, although three days before that they had rejected a ceasefire deal, saying that weapons should be pumped into Ukraine before any negotiations so that it can act from positions of strength. But they have changed their stance as soon as the wind shifted.

On March 11, when the Ukrainians and Zelensky said they were ready for a ceasefire and the task was to force President Putin to do the same, they sent a record large number of drones (about 340) into central Russia, including Moscow and the Moscow Region. It was the largest drone attack ever, but the West has swallowed the insult. Nobody expressed shock at the Ukrainians doing that after publicly expressing readiness for a ceasefire. Did they wait for Russia to respond in kind? All the 340 drones were launched at civilian facilities, but our air defence system neutralised them.

The same is happening now. When the meeting in Riyadh was prepared, we agreed with the Americans, based on the arrangements made by Putin and Trump, that it would be attended by Russian and US experts. But it looks like some "active guys" in Washington are eager to put something on paper as soon as possible, and so they have invited the Ukrainians to Riyadh as well. The Ukrainians arrived a day before the meeting and stayed after our experts have left.

Just between ourselves, even though I don't think it's a big secret, we sensed before the Riyadh meeting that the Americans wanted to place Russians and Ukrainians in adjacent rooms, engaging in shuttle diplomacy to ultimately produce a coordinated document. However, we have reiterated what our presidents discussed - our unequivocal stance, which has been agreed by our presidents, is that progress must be reliable and there must not be any unsubstantiated documents. Even if some documents are adopted under "guarantees," our American colleagues are to ensure that the Kiev regime complies these guarantees.

That is the point. Europe is trying to undermine Washington's role in the Ukrainian settlement. It does not want to settle it by removing the root causes of the crisis. I have already mentioned these root causes: NATO, and the legal and physical destruction of the Russian speakers' rights and everything associated with Russia.

Question: At the same time, Steve Witkoff has stated optimistically that a ceasefire could be agreed by Easter, that is, within a month, although he previously said that it could be achieved within two weeks. Do you share his optimism? I know that you are not paid to be optimistic.

Sergey Lavrov: Some people often compare Soviet customs and traditions with the current developments in some Western countries, like fulfilling five-year plans in four years. After we abandoned atheism, the deadline has been set for Easter (it could have been Christmas, with the same result). That is not how I would formulate the question. I understand Steve Witkoff. He is a clever and energetic person who thinks that everyone should be aware of the things he regards as obvious. Judging by the statements he made during his conversation with Tucker Carlson, the essence of this conflict is clear to him. But he overestimates the European elites who want to prevent Zelensky from showing "weakness."   

Zelensky does not want to show weakness either. He knows that his days are numbered, and that his positive image he has been cultivating among the people has long since faded, with the exception of those (quite numerous) who hold radical, far-right and revenge-seeking Bandera views.

Question: Relations between Russia and the United States have been gradually deteriorating throughout these years, even during Donald Trump's first term in office. We can even say that these relations have reached their all-time low. Why has the President of the United States chosen this precise moment in time to change the whole paradigm of Russia-US ties?

Sergey Lavrov: I think that the experience he acquired during his first term was invaluable for him, primarily in terms of realising that he needed to have a team of his own. The deterioration in our relations was largely attributable to the fact that there were all these random people forming Donald Trump's entourage during his first term. Pundits in the United States have been arguing that this resulted from a widely shared belief that he would not become President so he did not do much to prepare himself for this office. This is how people who would later betray him became part of the administration.

He has recently talked about his then Vice President, and his Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor who keeps criticising Trump in a quite unpolite, or should I say in a quite boorish manner. Donald Trump is a man of action, so he decided to seek revenge for the 2020 election when Joe Biden was voted into office by millions of dead people or those who cast mail-in ballots. Donald Trump decided to settle his scores and claim what history owed him and to fulfil the will of the American people. And he succeeded by completely changing the way he ran his campaign. The fact that Donald Trump has been able to get the Senate to approve his main picks so quickly demonstrates that he has been working on it for a long time.

This is a team of like-minded people, and these people do not shy away from saying things they agree upon and which they believe to reflect the national interests of the American people. During our trip to Riyadh with Yury Ushakov, we met with Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, as I have already said in one of my interviews. Marco Rubio said that Donald Trump's foreign policy is designed to serve US national interests with an understanding that other countries, especially major world powers have their own national interests. These interests may not necessarily coincide, and in fact they do not coincide, in most cases. But when they do, it would be a crime not to make use of this convergence for coming up with mutually beneficial tangible joint economic, energy, infrastructure and logistics projects.

He also made a second point by saying that when these interests do not coincide, as it happens in most cases, any power which has a sense of responsibility must do everything to prevent these differences from evolving into a confrontation, let alone allowing an actual confrontation to break out.

We were all in on this approach. I believe that US-China relations rely on these very principles too. These two countries have so many disagreements and have often had tense exchanges on the Taiwan Strait and the South-China Sea with the Chinese condemning the United States and other Western countries for viewing Taiwan as an independent state. China argues that it wants to unite its land by peaceful means. At the same time, it is prepared to use other methods for achieving this goal for the great people of China. How has the United States responded to this posture? Do not even dare. Still, the dialogue between the two countries never stopped.

I believe that what we have experienced under Joe Biden was an anomaly, which did not do any credit to the politicians behind this policy, especially to Joe Biden considering his experience. He prided himself on being such a seasoned politician. But all of a sudden, we had this little-boy-in-a-kindergarten kind of attitude when a boy turns away from a girl or vice versa saying "I will not be friends with you, and will not hang out with you." What a silly attitude.

The fact that we have resumed dialogue despite all our differences signals a return to normalcy. We need this kind of dialogue, especially since it is not limited to Ukraine.

Joe Biden artificially positioned the Ukraine topic on top of the international agenda. Many friends have been telling us that this topic did not deserve to be treated this way and that the response to Russia's special military operation was blown out of proportion. In fact, we started signalling dangerous developments 10 years before launching the operation. We shouted about it from all corners after the government coup and to protest NATO's involvement. Even during his 2007 Munich speech, Vladimir Putin said we were witnessing a new phenomenon of Western impunity, its feeling of excessive integrity and exceptionalism. And it all materialised.

There are differences today too, of course. However, will restoring normal energy supplies to Europe serve only the interests of the United States and Russia? I am referring to the Nord Stream pipelines. It would probably be interesting to see whether the United States uses the leverage it has on Europe to force it to stop buying Russian gas. This is when it all takes on a tint of surrealism. Today, Europe and its businesses are paying several times more for their energy compared to US companies. At the same time, people like Robert Habeck, Ursula von der Leyen and Boris Pistorius have been saying that they would never allow the Nord Stream pipelines to be restored. These people are either sick or suicidal.

There is nothing abnormal in having a conversation. As you know, and I would like to make this point once again, we discussed prospects for removing obstacles so that we can engage in mutually beneficial joint economic projects in energy, space, and the Arctic. Russia and the United States are Arctic nations, after all.

That said, we do not have any illusions. The so-called Biden partners have caused a very deep chasm in our bilateral relations. However, Donald Trump's people have been seeking to shift to a mutually beneficial relationship whenever possible and to build mutually respectful ties on matters we can agree upon, while preventing the differences between two major nuclear powers from escalating into a confrontation. We have reached a consensus on this matter.

Question: Does "do not have any illusions" mean that we will act differently in these relations? Which mistakes that we possibly made before won't be repeated?

Sergey Lavrov: "Trust but verify." It is a signature phrase of Ronald Reagan, which President Trump has recalled. We won't forget it.

It is a combination of a civilisational view of the current development stage when national interests should become the priority, when it has become clear that globalisation has been destroyed, including through the actions of the previous US administration. They started using the dollar as a weapon. Donald Trump said after the elections but before he assumed office that it was a bad mistake, if not a crime, of Biden to use the dollar to punish certain countries. As a result, not only those he wanted to punish by preventing them from using the dollar but also others critically assessed the situation. They were punishing Russia, Iran, Venezuela and several other countries. But what if they didn't like someone else? You may remember that Joe Biden offended Saudi Arabia and then had to go there to make peace with it.

All countries think more or less alike - anyone who is not on the black list now might fall out of favour with the US administration any day, considering that each new administration can cancel the agreements made by the previous administration.

To be on the safe side, they are thinking about replacing the dollar and the euro with national currencies in mutual settlements, even if not creating a new currency. Europeans are even less predictable. Discussions of payments mechanisms such as BRICS Pay are underway, and this process can't be reversed.

President Donald Trump is a man of action. He doesn't like to be engaged in philosophical speculation; he likes to settle problems. He has said that the United States needs Greenland for national security. We discussed this with the Americans, and my impression is that they understand our position. They accept a comparison according to which Ukraine is much more important for Russia's national security than Greenland is for US national security. They understand it.

I'd like to say a few words about Greenland. A shameful thing has happened. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated before meeting Trump in the White House that he didn't want the Americans to drag NATO into the Greenland debate. What does this mean? A man who is responsible for protecting the interests of the member states (Denmark, which currently owns Greenland, is a NATO member) and for preventing infringements on their territorial integrity has stated that he would not be dragged into the debate despite his responsibility. At the same time, Rutte has no scruples about declaring unwavering support for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which is not and will never be a NATO member. He has refused to protect Denmark's territorial integrity but is ready to stand up for Ukraine. He is ridiculous and pathetic.

READ MORE: Zelensky claims US intel freeze had little impact on Kursk incursion

Question: The United States wants China to join the New START talks. Could this offer a workable solution, in your opinion?

Sergey Lavrov: It is up to the People's Republic of China to decide, as we have been saying all along. Beijing has commented on this matter many times whenever this topic surfaced in the public space. Its position consists of saying that China's nuclear arsenal pales in comparison with what the United States and Russia have. The time to review the way nuclear powers interact would come once their arsenals become comparable.

Just as before, we remain engaged with the nuclear five at the level of our representatives at the United Nations. There are also meetings at the level of deputy ministers. It was Russia's initiatives to convene an online summit in January 2022 for reaffirming the Gorbachev-Reagan formula whereby a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, within this five-party framework. All five nuclear powers reaffirmed this formula.

We have nothing against continuing to work within this framework. By the way, this has been an ongoing, uninterrupted effort. This format mostly deals with confidence building measures and matters which are not related to any restrictions, limitations or even discussing the sizes of nuclear arsenals or avoiding incidents.

Just like Joe Biden before him, President of the United States Donald Trump has been saying that China had to join these talks. We adopted the following position. First, it is up to Beijing to decide, and the decision it makes - we will fully respect its choice. If we are adding more parties to these talks, what about France and the UK? Together with the United States, these two countries are all members of a single alliance. During the Biden years, and even earlier, this entity said a lot of nasty things about Russia and went on to designate us as the main adversary. If this is the case, while we are told to launch a conversation without touching upon these two aspects, this seems unfair.

There is a need to restore Russia-US strategic stability dialogue. We agree on this point. Of course, the only way we can do this is by reviving the very principles governing the New START and set forth in its preambular part, including when it mentions the way strategic offensive and defensive weapons are linked, as well as mutual respect and agreements to offer each other equal treatment. How can we talk about stability while doctrines designate us as an adversary?

We stand for talks on all fronts, be it hockey, or football, or what have you. By the way, this goes beyond sports. This is what people want. In the sports world, an overwhelming majority of prominent figures from both Russia and the United States, as well as from any other country, including Western nations, believe that the efforts to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from competitions are totally abnormal. They also share the view that it is not okay when a man calls himself a woman and goes on to fight a boxing match against an actual woman. There is a sense within US President Donald Trump administration that you cannot mess with human nature or distort it, and that traditional religious, cultural and moral values must be preserved. This must have a salutary effect on the Western society in general. I hope that this materialises.

The translation of this interview has been provided by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.