Remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
In an interview with Rossiya 1 television, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made important remarks about Washington’s continued efforts to control the situation around Ukraine and weaken Russia after the inauguration of the US President-elect Donald Trump administration.
“Given that Washington has always tried to keep under its control everything that happens in the regions close to NATO and, naturally, in the NATO area, its basic attitude towards Ukraine and European affairs in this sense will not change. The European Union is now the same as NATO from a military-political point of view.”
Lavrov emphasised that the United States has no doubts about its desire to keep everything under its control:
- “Now some of them have begun to take a healthier view of the situation in Ukraine and say: ‘What has been lost cannot be regained, let’s freeze it somehow.”
- “Those who now claim that they have radically changed their position and want to stop the war are proposing ‘let’s have a ceasefire on the contact line for ten years and then we’ll see’.”
- “But this is the Minsk agreements in a new package. It is even worse.”
Lavrov said that the Minsk agreements were the final agreements and that if someone had tried to realise at the time that this was exactly the case, a different course could have been taken. Reminding that a tiny part of Donbass was included in the Minsk agreements, Lavrov continued as follows:
- “Everything collapsed because Zelensky, and before him Poroshenko, categorically did not want to give the part of Donbass that would remain on the Ukrainian side a special status, first of all, the right to speak in their native language.”
- “The fact that the West, despite our many reminders about the root causes of this conflict, including not only Ukraine’s withdrawal to NATO, but also the legal and deliberate destruction of everything Russian, swallows them all, no one pays attention to this.”
Noting that the Republicans are not even talking about the right of the inhabitants of Ukraine to speak their native language, Russian , Lavrov emphasised the following points:
- “In the Republican camp, among those who express revolutionary ideas on how to end the conflict in Ukraine, no one says ‘yes, of course, it is necessary to restore the rights of the Ukrainian people to speak in their native language, to education, to teach their children Russian, to receive information in Russian’.”
Finally, Lavrov emphasised that the United States sees Russia as a competitor and continues its efforts to weaken the Russian world:
- “We have said it many times, we are saying it and we will continue to say it.”
- “None of the architects of the so-called Ukrainian settlement in the West are paying attention to this.”
- “If we return to the similarity of the goals of the US administrations, they are interested in weakening Russia and its influence, in weakening the Russian world, because ultimately everything that happens is motivated by the desire to suppress Russia as a competitor.”
- “The Americans long ago declared: ‘There should not be a single state in the world more influential than the United States’.”
