MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia welcomes U.S. President Donald Trump’s view that drawing Ukraine towards the NATO military alliance was an issue of concern to Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday.
Trump said in January that he sympathized with the Russian position that Ukraine should not be part of NATO and blamed outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden for allegedly changing the U.S. position on NATO membership for Ukraine.
“Suddenly, for the first time, President Trump, in one of his first speeches, criticising the position of the administration of Biden on the Ukrainian crisis, bluntly said that one of the main mistakes was drawing Ukraine into NATO,” Lavrov said.
“For the first time the problem of NATO was identified as something that the United States is ready to discuss seriously,” Lavrov said.
(Reporting by Reuters. Writing by Guy Faulconbridge and Gleb Stolyarov; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
