Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with Rossiya 24 and RIA Novosti, Moscow, February 2, 2023

Submitted on Fri, 02/03/2023 - 08:17

Question: The first question is probably not strictly professional but more human. Still, it worries millions if not billions of people. When will this whole thing end?

Sergey Lavrov: I cannot say that this is my only concern. I think diplomats and military, the men that are now resolving the vital tasks of ensuring our independence and protecting the interests of our culture and the people who want to be part of Russian culture probably are not thinking about when it will end.

They are driven by the desire to do their job accurately and quickly, minimising losses. The more active we are in supporting them morally and politically and the better we explain the gist of what is happening in terms of geopolitical games, the sooner the world will realise the need to end it. We are seeing not even attempts but the stubborn, insistent policy of the US-led West of not ending it ever. They will pursue it until they decide that all threats to their hegemony are removed.

At the current stage, we are acting in line with what our Western colleagues said – there must be a victory on the battlefield. These are their words. They renounced talks and compelled the Kiev regime to quit the negotiations in late March 2022, when it was still possible to end it politically.

But Kiev was not allowed to do this. Since then nobody has even tried to persuade the Kiev regime of the need for talks. Nobody objected when Vladimir Zelensky prohibited talks with the Russian Federation by executive order. Nobody took him down a peg when he repeatedly declared, while in “high spirits,” that he didn’t understand who made decisions in Russia and with whom to talk (if matters come to this). This seems to be straight out of Freud. He feels his dependence and understands that he is being manipulated. We all want this to end. But what matters at this point is not the time but the essence, the quality of results we will ensure for our people and those who want to remain part of Russian culture – the Kiev junta, with the West’s encouragement, was depriving them of all things Russian for many years.

In addition to the laws passed under Petr Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky,  Kiev did the following  - banned Russian education and Russian media, and Ukrainian media in the Russian language (all of them were shut down), arrested deputies that showed any initiative to reach agreement with Russia, and made decisions allowing administrative fines to be imposed on those who do not use Ukrainian in daily life (shops and outpatient clinics). Recently, Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language Taras Kremen came out with an initiative to ban personal communication in Russian. Say, husband and wife are drinking tea in the kitchen, and some snitch (as we used to call them) can easily get them charged with a crime. The upper crust of this regime has good “prospects” indeed. 

To be continued...