Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov plans to visit Malta this December to attend the Organization for Security and Cooperation Ministerial Council (OSCE) meeting, the ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Vedomosti newspaper on Oct. 31.
If the visit takes place, it will be Lavrov's first trip to an EU country since the launch of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The last time Lavrov visited an EU country was in 2021, when he traveled to the OSCE meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. He also visited the U.N. General Assembly in New York several times during Moscow's all-out war.
While both the EU and the U.S. imposed sanctions on Lavrov in February 2022, they did not impose a travel ban as the EU and U.K. wanted to keep open diplomatic channels with Russia.
According to the Maltese embassy in Russia, the decision to hold the meeting of OSCE's Council of Foreign Ministers scheduled for Dec. 5-6 "applies to all [its] members, including the Russian Federation," the Russian newspaper wrote.
In 2023, Lavrov attended the OSCE summit in North Macedonia, which sparked a rift among the OSCE members, leading to a boycott of the meeting by foreign ministers of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states.
The OSCE was formed in the 1970s as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, which provided a platform for dialogue between the Eastern Bloc and Western Bloc during the Cold War.
In September, Lavrov warned in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly that Ukraine and its Western allies should not try "to fight to victory with a nuclear power."
Since the launch of the full-scale invasion, Russia has repeatedly invoked the threat of its nuclear arsenal to deter Western military support for Ukraine.
In his General Assembly address, Lavrov called Western attempts to defeat Russia "a suicidal escapade."
"I'm not going to talk here about the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is," Lavrov said.
Chris York
(Updated: )
