Russia shrugs off threat of permanent expulsion from G8

The Russian foreign minister has shrugged off the threat of exclusion from meetings of the world's largest industrial countries and the suspension of the G8, saying that Moscow was 'not clinging to' membership of what he described as an informal group.

Sergei Lavrov was speaking minutes after his first meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Deshchytsia, at the margins of the global nuclear security summit in The Hague. He said that he would maintain contacts with the authorities in Kiev, but gave no sign of any breakthrough in the impasse over the future of Crimea.

He drew a comparison between Crimea and Kosovo and asked whether the west wanted 'blood to [be] shed' in the same way.

As he was speaking, leaders from the G7 industrialised countries, including Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and François Hollande, were meeting nearby in the Dutch prime minister's residence, to discuss how to increase punitive pressure on Russia for its annexation of Crimea. Western diplomats said they expected a joint statement dissolving the G8 group, which has provided a forum for contacts between the western industrialised world and Russia since 1998.

'As long as the political environment for the G8 is not at hand, as is the case at the moment, there is no G8 - neither as a concrete summit meeting or even as a format for meetings,' Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said before the talks.

Lavrov presented the threat as insignificant.

'The G8 is an informal club, with no formal membership, so no one can be expelled from it,' Lavrov said. 'Its raison d'etre was for deliberations between western industrialised countries and Russia, but there are other fora for that now ... so if our western partners say there is no future for that format, then so be it. We are not clinging to that format.'

He claimed to have won 'understanding' for Russia's stance from countries including Brazil, India China and South Africa.

Shortly before his meeting with Lavrov, Deshchytsia, the acting Ukrainian foreign minister, said his government had been seeking such an encounter for three weeks, 'to establish a dialogue on how we can peacefully settle the conflict that exists between Ukraine and Russia'.

'We wanted to find out what they are thinking about Ukraine and what they are thinking of their plans towards Ukraine,' Deshchytsia said.

'We want to live peacefully with Russia. We want our nations to co-exist and they will co-exist. So we wanted to sit down around the table and find a solution, maybe drink vodka. But since we don't know their plans, the possibility for a military intervention is very high, taking into consideration the intel information about the deployment of a very big number of Russian troops on the eastern borders of Ukraine.

'We are very much worried about the concentration of troops on our eastern borders but at the same time we are ready to defend our homeland. Our military and civilians living in eastern Ukraine - Ukrainians, Russians other nationalities - are ready to defend their homeland, and our military is also ready to defend Ukraine.'