MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s diplomacy with the West is in crisis management mode and is focused on trying to ensure that tensions do not spill over into a large-scale conflict, the TASS news agency on Friday reported a top diplomat as saying.
TASS cited Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as telling it in an interview that security guarantees which Russia had sought and discussed with the West in 2021 were no longer relevant and that Moscow had no trust in the NATO military alliance.
“Our scale of priorities, including in the sphere of ensuring our own security and forming a more stable framework for these efforts, has completely changed (since 2021),” Ryabkov told TASS.
“What is happening on the Western direction is now, first of all, the task of the military,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying.
“Diplomacy in this direction is working, I would say, in crisis management mode and in … preventing a slide to a really large-scale conflict.”
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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