The Russian Foreign Minister appears to justify the war and puts the US, NATO, the OSCE and the Pope at the center of his criticism
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, intervenes very frequently to defend Moscow’s positions in international politics and, above all, with regard to the invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24. Today he offered a new press conference, this time by videoconference, for the foreign press accredited in Russia and went much further than usual in his attempt to justify the offensive of the Russian Army in the neighboring country.
In his words, the Ukrainian infrastructures, the target of massive missile fire since the beginning of October and which have left almost half the country without electricity, “provide combat potential to the Ukrainian armed forces, to the nationalist battalions. The attacks are carried out with high-precision weapons.” “The energy facilities on which the operation of the Ukrainian Army depends and on which the delivery of a huge amount of weapons that the West supplies to Ukraine to kill Russians depend on are also being deactivated,” said the head of Russian Diplomacy.
In his opinion, the condemnations of such bombings by governments and the press in the West forget the actions of the US and the Atlantic Alliance against different countries. “Compare the hysteria unleashed now in the Western media with what happened when the United States bombed Iraq,” Lavrov said before stating that “in the former Yugoslavia, NATO also bombed a television center in Belgrade on the grounds that served the enemy’s war propaganda.”
“Now what is happening means that NATO is going back to those conceptual priorities that were developed 73 years ago, in the days of the Cold War. Nothing has changed: they want to keep the Russians out of Europe. The Americans have already enslaved all of Europe, and they keep under their control not only the Germans, but the entire European Union,” the Russian foreign minister said.
In his opinion, “The United States now lives at the expense of Europe and will benefit from the economic and energy crisis into which” the Old Continent has fallen. “They will sell gas to Europe four times more expensive than the Russian gas they bought (…) and they will allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to their industry to drive investors away from Europe and de-industrialize it.” Lavrov believes that Washington “is trying to build security without Russia and Belarus. We don’t need that kind of security. The entire security of Europe lies in the fact that it has completely submitted to the United States (…) whose plan is to deplete Europe’s stocks of weapons in order to sell it its own.”
“Reckless Expansion”
The Russian minister considers that “this basic instinct that has never disappeared from the Americans or other NATO members explains the course towards the reckless expansion of this military bloc, which has also devalued the main significance of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe –OSCE– as a collective instrument to guarantee equal and indivisible security”. Lavrov asserts that the West, and especially the United States, “for many years have been trying to carry out an OSCE takeover.”
Lavrov’s speech this Thursday comes just as the OSCE foreign ministers are meeting today and tomorrow in the Polish city of Lodz. “The decision of Poland, which currently chairs the OSCE, to deny the participation of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the organization’s ministerial meeting in Lodz on December 1 and 2 is unprecedented and provocative,” he declared last week. November 19, the Russian Foreign Ministry in a statement.
Warsaw justified itself by explaining that the Russian delegation should not “include people sanctioned by the European Union after Russia’s illegal aggression against Ukraine on February 24”, in direct reference to Lavrov, who today also accused the Special Surveillance Mission of the OSCE in Ukraine to “collect intelligence, cooperate with Western secret services, pass information on to the Ukrainian Army and help fine-tune fire on Donetsk and Lugansk militia positions.” According to his account, the OSCE also provided kyiv with “information from its surveillance cameras near the front line.”
In relation to possible peace talks, the head of Russian Diplomacy stressed that “when we are accused of constantly asking for some kind of negotiation to buy time to gather additional forces for the special military operation, this is ridiculous at the same time. and unfortunate, because people lie, openly lie. We never asked for negotiations, but we always said that if anyone has an interest in a negotiated solution, we are ready to listen.”
Against the Holy See
Lavrov also lashed out at Pope Francis, who called the Chechen and Buryat soldiers fighting in Ukraine “cruel.” “Recently, there was a very incomprehensible statement, not at all Christian, that points to two Russian nationalities in some category from which atrocities can be expected during combat (…) something that calls into question the authority of the Holy See” .
In short, in an apparent hint ahead of the start of a new negotiation process with the White House, Lavrov assured today that his country “is ready to resume dialogue with the United States, but only if Washington demonstrates its willingness to discuss projects on guarantees security and realizes his mistakes. “If our Western interlocutors own up to their mistakes and express their willingness to return to the discussion of the documents we proposed in December, I think it would be positive,” he added.
In December 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry published drafts of the proposed agreements “on security guarantees” required by the Kremlin. They proposed putting an end to NATO expansion, excluding the Alliance’s military presence in Ukraine, Central Asia, Transcaucasia and Eastern Europe, and banning Ukraine from joining this Western military bloc. There was no agreement then and, as Moscow repeats over and over again, the West’s rejection of its requests led to the current conflict in Ukraine.
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