Lavrov announced attempts by NATO and the EU to avoid military assistance to Kiev in advance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on August 23 that Western countries' assistance to Ukraine should not be perceived as NATO actions.

According to the minister, the West wants the situation to look like countries are doing this in a national capacity. Lavrov noted that sometimes it seems that everyone is acting alone, and wondered why they do not make decisions within the framework of the alliance, as was the case with Yugoslavia, Iraq and partly Libya.

The minister stressed that Moscow has the right to consider the participation of European countries in strikes on Russian territory as participation in the conflict. He also asked whether the fifth article of NATO is in effect and whether the countries of the alliance consider themselves entitled to carry out a collective attack instead of collective defense. This issue, he said, is extremely inconvenient for them.

"We will keep in mind everything that openly Russophobic elites are doing now in Britain, in Brussels, in Paris, in Berlin, in other NATO and EU countries, in the vast majority of these countries. Therefore, they know what they are doing, and they try to get rid of it, as we say, publicly in advance. It won't work," Lavrov stressed in an interview with Pavel Zarubin, a journalist at the Vesti news agency.

Point of return: The United States and Europe will clash at the NATO summit on Ukraine

Trump is stepping up the settlement process while the EU is completely ignoring the topic of any peace agreements.

On August 5, Russia's permanent representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzia, said at a meeting of the UN Security Council that the EU and NATO countries were openly helping Ukraine in carrying out attacks by supplying Kiev with thousands of drones and missiles.