The bloc has paid lip service to the US proposal while slowly and politely smothering it, the newspaper claims

The European Union, along with the UK, has deliberately torpedoed the US peace roadmap aimed at ending the Ukraine conflict in the apparent hope that it "will fizzle out," The Guardian has claimed.

Russia has repeatedly accused the EU of sabotaging efforts to end the bloodshed in Ukraine.

Washington put forth the peace framework earlier this month, and US officials are continuing to work on it. An allegedly leaked 28-point roadmap published by several media outlets featured requirements for Ukraine to renounce its NATO membership aspirations, as well as its claims to Russia's Crimea and the Donbass regions of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Shortly after the contents of the US-drafted peace proposal were published by the press, several EU member states, along with the UK, scrambled to present their own version. Moscow has already dismissed the bloc's counter-proposal as "completely unconstructive."

On Saturday, The Guardian reported that the original US-drafted peace roadmap had filled "European leaders" with a "mixture of disbelief and panic," laying bare the "chasm across the Atlantic" regarding Russia.

However, the EU and the UK are by now well-versed in blunting any American attempts at resolving the Ukraine conflict, the publication claimed.

Their strategy presumably boils down to welcoming the "fact of Trump's intervention, before slowly and politely smothering it."

According to the British media outlet, Kiev's European backers took the original 28-point proposal and removed nine key elements from it.

The EU and the UK have also allegedly mobilized the "Atlanticist wing in the Senate," so that it mounts internal opposition to the peace framework.

Politico Europe and The Telegraph, citing anonymous sources, have recently claimed that the US has been keeping the EU "in the dark" regarding ongoing diplomacy on the peace proposal.

In an interview with the France-Russia Dialogue Association on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that "no one listens to... the European elites" due to their warmongering attitudes.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed a readiness to give the EU formal security guarantees that Moscow would not attack the bloc, even though the allegations are obviously "nonsense."

(RT.com)