Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov underscored the need to recognize and formalize on the international level the accession of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossia to Russia.

Axar.az reports, citing TASS, "For peace to be durable, the new territorial realities that emerged after the accession of Crimea, Sevastopol, the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic], the LPR [Lugansk People’s Republic], and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to the Russian Federation following the referenda must be recognized and formalized in an international legal manner," he said in an interview with Indonesia’s Kompas newspaper.

Lavrov named three other preconditions for a lasting peace, including "eradicating the underlying causes of the conflict which include threats to Russia’s security that arose in the wake of NATO’s expansion and attempts to drag Ukraine into this aggressive military bloc." In his words, "these threats must be eliminated, and a new system of security guarantees for Russia and Ukraine must be formed as an integral part of a pan-continental architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia."

The top Russian diplomat is convinced that "it is no less important to ensure the restoration and observance of human rights in the territories remaining under the control of the Kiev regime, which, as I noted earlier, is exterminating everything connected with Russia, Russians, and Russian-speaking people, including the Russian language, culture, traditions, canonical Orthodoxy, and Russian-language media." "Today, Ukraine is the only country where the use of the language spoken by a significant portion of the population has been outlawed," he added.

Also, "Ukraine’s neutral, non-aligned, and nuclear-free status must be ensured." "These conditions were spelled out in Ukraine’s 1990 Declaration of Independence, and Russia and the international community used them to recognise the Ukrainian statehood," Lavrov said.