Brussels 16.03.2022 Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told RBC News that “neutral status is now being seriously discussed along, of course, with security guarantees.”

The ‘arrogant’ US-led West ignored Moscow’s proposed security guarantees following many years of admonitions and exhortations from the Russian side regarding NATO’s steady eastward expansion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“Once the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and even after the Soviet Union became extinct, NATO, at its own discretion and without consultations whatsoever with anyone, who had been a part of the balance of power on the European continent, set out on moving eastward and kept moving the line of the defence, pushing it further and further in the direction to the east,” Lavrov said in an interview with Russia’s RBC TV channel.

“When this line was pushed right up [to Russian borders] and all our admonitions over the past 20 years were not taken seriously, we drafted our own initiatives on European security and they, to our deep disappointment, have been shrugged off by our arrogant Western partners,” Lavrov explained.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on March 12 that the previously proposed security guarantees to the United States and NATO were no longer valid because the situation has dramatically changed.