European and Russian media are reporting that London and Moscow have agreed to hold rare high-level talks to discuss the crisis along the Russian-Ukrainian border.
The Russian state news agency TASS reported on January 22 that British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss would visit Moscow in February for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
TASS quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry source as saying that “the British foreign minister has asked for the opportunity to travel to Moscow,” and that the visit had been approved.
Truss’s proposed visit would be the first by a British foreign secretary to Moscow since December 2017.
There was no immediate reaction from London.
Meanwhile, the AFP news agency quoted a “senior U.K. defense source” as saying Defense Secretary Ben Wallace had invited Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to hold talks about the Ukraine tensions.
“Given the last defense bilateral between our two countries took place in London in 2013, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has offered to meet in Moscow instead,” the source was quoted as saying.
The initiatives come at a time of heightened tensions between Russia and the West over Russia’s military buildup along its border with Ukraine and Moscow’s demands for curbs on NATO’s activity in countries of the former Soviet Union.
In a speech in Australia on January 21, Truss warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to “desist and step back from Ukraine before he makes a massive strategic mistake.”
She said an invasion of Ukraine would “only lead to a terrible quagmire and loss of life.”
The proposed talks also come against a background of bilateral tensions between the United Kingdom and Russia following the 2006 fatal radiation poisoning in London of former Russian security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko and the 2018 attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal using a Soviet-developed nerve agent.
The British government has blamed Moscow for carrying out both attacks, accusations that Moscow denies.
