Russian foreign minister appears to justify war, putting US, NATO, OSCE and Pope at the center of his criticism
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov very often intervenes to defend Moscow’s positions in international politics and especially with regard to the invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24. Today he offered a new press conference, this time by video conference, for the foreign press accredited in Russia and went far beyond the 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 rocket fire since the beginning of October and which have left almost half of the country without electricity, “offer 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 supply of a huge amount of weapons that the West supplies to Ukraine to kill Russians depends, are also deactivated,” he 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 several countries. “Compare the hysteria now erupting 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 grounds that the war propaganda of the served the enemy.”
“What is happening now means that NATO is going back to the conceptual priorities 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 turned all of Europe into enslaved and they keep under their control not only the Germans, but the entire European Union,” said the Russian foreign minister.
According to him, “The United States is now living 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 that is 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 deindustrialize it. ” Lavrov believes Washington is “trying to build security without Russia and Belarus. We don’t need that kind of security. The whole security of Europe lies in its complete submission to the United States (…) whose plan is to exhaust Europe’s arms stocks in order to sell it its own.”
The Russian minister believes 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 is also the main significance of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe – OSCE – as a collective instrument to ensure equal and indivisible security.” Lavrov claims that the West, and especially the United States, “have been trying for many years to carry out an OSCE takeover”.
Lavrov’s speech this Thursday comes just as OSCE foreign ministers are meeting today and tomorrow in the Polish city of Lodz. “The decision by Poland, which currently presides over the OSCE, to refuse 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 said. week. Ministry in a statement.
Warsaw justified itself by explaining that the Russian delegation should not “take in people sanctioned by the European Union after Russia’s illegal aggression against Ukraine on February 24”, in direct reference to Lavrov, who today also joined the special surveillance mission of the OSCE in Ukraine accused of “gathering intelligence, cooperating with Western secret services, passing information to the Ukrainian army and helping to refine the fire on the Donetsk and Lugansk militia positions.” According to his report, the OSCE also provided Kyiv with “information from its surveillance cameras near the frontline”.
With regard 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 troops for the special military operation, this is simultaneously ridiculous and unfortunate , because people lie, openly lie. We have never asked for negotiations, but we have always said that if someone has an interest in a negotiated solution, we are willing to listen.”
Lavrov also lashed out at Pope Francis for calling the Chechen and Buryat soldiers fighting in Ukraine “cruel.” “Recently there was a very incomprehensible statement, not Christian at all, pointing to two Russian nationalities in a certain category from whom atrocities can be expected during combat (…) something that calls into question the authority of the Holy See”.
In short, in a clear hint ahead of the start of a new negotiation process with the White House, Lavrov today assured that his country is “ready to resume dialogue with the United States, but only if Washington demonstrates its willingness to to discuss warranties. safety and realizes his mistakes. “If our Western interlocutors acknowledge their mistakes and express their willingness to return to discussing the documents we proposed in December, I think that 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 ending 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 again and again, the rejection of its requests by the West led to the current conflict in Ukraine.
Source: La Verdad
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