Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned the Kremlin will respond “hard” if it detects US antagonism, as he suggested Washington had put pressure on Moscow since the summit between presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden.
Lavrov’s comments came as Moscow announced it had carried out military drills amid ongoing tensions with NATO, for conducting war games in the Black Sea region, which Russia regards as its backyard.
Lavrov said that after the Geneva summit between Putin and Biden last month, American officials had expressed “with double force” how the US had “warned and outlined demands” to Moscow during the summit.
“All these warnings come with threats – if Russia in ‘a few months’ fails to accept the ‘rules of the game’ outlined in Geneva, it will come under new pressure,” Lavrov told the Indonesian newspaper, Rakyat Merdeka.
Lavrov said the US stance was at odds with the tone of the summit itself in which both sides made “principled statements” and “showed a desire for mutual understanding.”
“Attempts to enter into dialogue with us from a position of strength will initially fail; we will respond vigorously and decisively to hostile moves,” he added, according to the Tass news agency.
“There is a need for fair cooperation if Washington really wants stable and predictable relations, as it says,” added Lavrov, who met his Indonesian counterpart in Jakarta on Monday. Newsweek has contacted the US State Department for comment.
Concerns in Moscow about the US commitment to improving relations with Russia follow rising tensions over NATO’s Sea Breeze drills that began last week.
On Tuesday the Russian defense ministry announced that it had conducted long-range flight exercises in the Saratov, Amur, Irkutsk and Ryazan regions. The exercise involved 20 units including the Tu-160 and Tu-95 MC strategic aircraft carriers and the Il-78 air-to-air refueling tanker, Tass reported.
A few days earlier, Russia tested the readiness of its air defense systems in Crimea, the peninsula annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
This follows an increase in tensions after Russia said it had to fire warning shots at the destroyer HMS Defender, a claim Britain denies.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov doubled down on Moscow’s insistence that the US had been involved in Moscow’s dispute with the British Navy over Crimea, which the international community does not recognize as Russia.
Ryabkov said the US and UK had tried to “hijack our coast guard systems and control systems over our waters,” Tass reported. He also said that talks between Moscow and Washington to outline a framework for discussing strategic stability would take place “before the end of July.”
