Lavrov expected to discuss Ukraine with Kerry in Paris

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov leaves for Paris on Tuesday where he is expected to hold talks with the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and to have a meeting with the French Foreign Minister, Loran Fabius.
The previous time Lavrov and Kerry had a personal meeting was on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session. On October 3, they had a telephone conversation.
Lavrov said then it was important for the conflicting sides in Ukraine to observe strictly the Minsk agreements on ceasefire, the pullback of heavy weapons and monitoring of the tactical situation by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The Department of State said Kerry phoned Lavrov to express concern over the intensifying violence in eastern Ukraine.
“The Ukrainian crisis shook up the international situation drastically and its impact will be felt for quite some time,” Lavrov said in an interview published on Monday. “It’s really difficult today to foretell the course that global developments will take but we can be sure the future will have many surprises in store for us.”

He believes the events that swept Ukraine in the past ten or so months did not reveal any new tendencies. Much rather, they accomplished a course towards Russia that the Western partners had been pursuing for years upon years.
Moscow and Washington continue maintaining radically different assessments of the Ukrainian crisis. The West goes on demanding that Russia exercise commitment to peaceful settlement and promising a mitigation of anti-Russian sanctions once Moscow fulfills a range of conditions but Lavrov dismisses this approach as trifling.
“We’re assisting compliance with the Minsk agreements not for the purposes of getting the sanctions lifted because they are the problem of those who imposed them on us,” he said.
Along with it, Lavrov has many a time stressed the persisting character of global threats and challenges, the struggle with which is now sacrificed for Washington’s self-serving scenarios.
The Russian Foreign Minister has more than once urged the U.S. Administration to drop the inadmissible classification of terrorists into ‘bad’ and ‘good’ ones, since the so-called ‘moderate militants’ very frequently start pointing their guns at those who supported them. This was exactly the case with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant grouping.
“Now that the Islamic State has declared the U.S. to be its main enemy, it would nice to recall that Isil consists of the very same people who rose to their feet and started getting power financial and material aid from abroad in the period of regime change in Libya and the attempts to do the same in Syria when all sorts of means were fair,” Lavrov said.
He also said that Moscow believes it is inadmissible to use the slogans of fighting against terrorism for changing regimes in foreign countries.
In spite of the existing controversies, however, the Russian side hopes for a fruitful dialogue at the talks in Paris.