Aggression against Russia will be met with ‘decisive response’, minister says

Russia’s top diplomat has told world leaders that his nation has no intention of attacking Europe, but any aggression against his country “will be met with a decisive response”.

Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov spoke as unauthorised flights into Nato’s airspace — intrusions blamed on Russia — have raised alarm around Europe in recent weeks, particularly after Nato jets downed drones over Poland and Estonia said Russian fighter jets flew into its territory.

Russia denied that its planes entered Estonian airspace and said the drones did not target Poland, with Moscow’s ally Belarus maintaining that Ukrainian signal-jamming sent the devices off course.

Mr Lavrov instead maintained that it is Russia that is facing threats.

“Russia has never had and does not have any such intentions” of attacking European or Nato countries, he said.

“However, any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response.”

Mr Lavrov spoke three years into an invasion of Ukraine that the international community has broadly deplored.

US president Donald Trump said this week that he believed Ukraine can win back all the territory it has lost to Russia.

It was a notable tone shift from a US leader who had previously suggested Ukraine would need to make some concessions and could never reclaim all the areas Russia has occupied since seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launching a full-scale invasion in 2022.

Just three weeks earlier, Russian president Vladimir Putin said his country and the US had a “mutual understanding” and that Mr Trump’s administration “is listening to us.”

Mr Trump’s new view came after he met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of General Assembly on Tuesday — seven months after a televised blow-up between the two in the Oval Office.

This time, the doors were closed, and the tenor was evidently different — “a good meeting,” as Mr Zelenskyy described it in his assembly speech the next day.

For the fourth year in a row, Mr Zelensky appealed to the gathering of presidents, prime ministers and other top officials to get Russia out of his country — and warned that inaction would put other countries at risk.

“Ukraine is only the first,” he said.

Russia has offered various explanations for the Ukraine war, among them assuring its own security after Nato expanded eastward over the years.

At a news conference after his speech, Mr Lavrov said Moscow appreciates Mr Trump’s proposal that led to rekindling a dialogue between the two countries.

When US and Russian interests do not coincide, he said, “the most important thing is not to let it result in confrontation or collision, especially a hot confrontation, and we’re united in this position, in diplomacy”.

He said some unnamed European countries have turned diplomacy “into kissing up to their friends from Washington”, so he believes the US will continue to support Ukraine and substitute diplomacy with sanctions.

“This is a path without any promise. It won’t succeed,” Russia’s top diplomat said.

“However, frank dialogue on any matters — well, we’ll see that the US is prepared for that, and we’re also prepared to conduct it.”