MOSCOW. July 8 (Interfax) - Russia will not tolerate attempts to push for a Ukraine settlement plan in an ultimatum form, while the decisions made at the summit in Buergenstock and the conference in Copenhagen should be consigned to the dustbin of history, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
"The Russian president left no doubt that we are ready to do the relevant work and negotiate, and that we welcome the efforts of those who see themselves as mediators or those who help the negotiation process. However, this should be done with an understanding that such efforts must lead, firstly, to Kiev's revision of its absolutely unrealistic, destructive position on refusing to negotiate with Moscow. Secondly, they should lead to the end of attempts to push something on Moscow, especially in the form of an ultimatum, as both the Americans and other Westerners have been trying to do recently through their Copenhagen and Burgenstock formats. All of that should be consigned to the dustbin of history," Ryabkov said in an interview with the International Affairs magazine.
For now, "an escalation of tensions has been the alpha and omega of the collective West led by the United States in what is happening in and around Ukraine," he said.
"This is extremely dangerous. The logic is that, for some reason completely incomprehensible to me, these people have come to the conclusion that, if the course towards escalation continues, Russia will waver and back down sooner or later, which will eventually inflict a so-called strategic defeat on it," Ryabkov said.
This course of the West "is a highly disturbing process, we have seen no analogues of it in the past," he said.
"There is no basis for a reasonable political process for now, and military escalation is continuing and acquiring ever more serious forms, being fraught with a direct armed confrontation between our country and the collective West led by the United States," Ryabkov said.
"It is inadmissible to play such games with a nuclear power," Ryabkov said. "Oddly, London, Washington and Paris, which have been developing conceptual approaches to the deterrence policy including its nuclear aspect for decades, have suddenly crossed the whole thing out, forgotten about it, and switched to the genre of a monopoly game, a geopolitical monopoly. A board game is not what we are witnessing today. One needs to realize that the whole thing may end very badly for the players," he said.