Question: Many people did not fully believe that Russia would launch a special military operation in Ukraine. The Russian side has repeatedly voiced the reasons, including the threat of a military-strategic nature from Kiev. What threats did Ukraine have or may have, forcing Russia to launch a military operation?
Sergey Lavrov: This story dates back to much earlier. And not even in 2014, when a bloody coup d'état was committed in Ukraine with the support of the West, but in the early 1990s, while the USSR ceased to exist. The Soviet (then Russian) leaders Boris Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze were promised by their Western colleagues that there would be no geopolitical turning point, NATO would not take advantage of the new situation and would not move its infrastructure to the east. Moreover, it will not accept new members. The British archives published the relevant records of the negotiations. Once again, it became crystal clear.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken out on this issue in his public speeches. Instead of fulfilling the promise and ensuring stability in Europe, NATO undertook five waves of eastward expansion. Moreover, all of them were accompanied by the deployment of the armed forces of the alliance members in these territories. They said that "on a temporary basis," but it quickly turned into a permanent one – all the time creating a military infrastructure. Now neutral EU member states or states such as Switzerland are also trying to involve NATO in meeting the needs. The "Military Mobility" project forces Austria, Sweden, Finland to provide transport capabilities so that NATO can transfer its armed forces. "NATOcentricity" becomes all-encompassing. The European Union, for all its slogans about the need for "strategic autonomy of Europe", is by no means inspired by this topic and perfectly agrees to be an obedient "appendage" of the North Atlantic Alliance.
This period was accompanied by a frank provocation of the post-Soviet states (primarily Ukraine): they say, you have to decide who you are with – with Russia or the West. They sounded directly "head-on", starting from the first "Maidan" in 2003, and this was also the case at the subsequent stage, when Ukraine under V.F. Yanukovych decided to wait a little with the signing of the Association Agreement with the European Union, because it contradicted the long-existing agreement on a free trade zone with the CIS. Viktor Yanukovych understood that it was necessary to harmonize the trade regime with Russia and other CIS countries and with Europe. That is why Brussels organized the "Maidan" and the protests, which resulted in bloody confrontations in February 2014.
Then "peace" had already been achieved. A settlement agreement was signed with Viktor Yanukovych. He resigned from all powers and held elections ahead of schedule (which he would not have won). Poland, France and Germany, who guaranteed this agreement, after the opposition committed a coup d'état and trampled on their guarantees, remained silent, as we say, "in a rag." They even began to welcome the forces that came to power, by and large, the putschists. These putschists first of all announced that they were abolishing the special status of the Russian language in Ukraine, did not want to see Russians in the Crimea, and sent armed gangs there. Crimeans refused to obey those who committed the coup d'état.
That's when it all happened. It all started at that time. People who openly encouraged neo-Nazi sentiments in society, the creation of appropriate organizations marching on torchlight processions with portraits of Hitler's criminals with openly neo-Nazi and Russophobic slogans came to power. The West accepted all this without meekness. Many even supported and encouraged in every possible way. Then the topic of Ukraine's accession to NATO began. V.A. Zelensky came to power under the slogans of peace and the need to save human lives, to prevent the death of either Ukrainians or Russians. In the end, he became the same Russophobe as the government of P.A. Poroshenko. V.A. Zelensky called people in Donbass "individuals". Under the previous president, Prime Minister A.P. Yatsenyuk called them "non-humans".
V.A. Zelensky did not do anything about the ongoing bloody war against his own people. He, in fact, lied, promising to restore order when they signed numerous agreements with representatives of the Donbass. He violated them without blinking an eye. All these eight years, we have tried to appeal to the conscience of the West and to reason with this regime, which has acquired all the outlines of ultra-radical and neo-Nazi. There was nothing the West could do. I think he did not even want to do anything, because even then Ukraine (and until 2014) was used as a tool to contain Russia. The whole current situation has developed due to the fact that the West refused to recognize the Equal Rights of the Russian Federation in the organization of the European security architecture.
This is confirmed by the reaction of the leading NATO countries, primarily the United States, to the initiatives that President Vladimir Putin put forward in December 2021 on the need to honestly implement what was agreed. No one should, even choosing their possible military alliances, do anything that would infringe on the security of any other country. This commitment was approved at the highest level, signed by the presidents and heads of government of the OSCE countries within the framework of the NATO-Russia Council. The West categorically refuses to comply with it. Zelensky said that if Russia does not stop demanding that Ukraine fulfill its obligations, then he will think about Ukraine regaining its nuclear weapons. It was a little too much.
Q: Was that the most important thing?
Sergey Lavrov: No. It all piled up. There are drops that overflow the cup of patience. I would suggest considering all that I have listed as an everyday argument, a phenomenon that convinced us day after day that the West had set a course for using Ukraine to contain Russia, to create an "anti-Russia", a "hostile belt". For a couple of years, Ukraine has been pumped with weapons, and recently it has been especially active. The Americans and the British built military and naval bases there, for example, on the Sea of Azov. Through the Pentagon, military biological laboratories were created in order to continue experiments on bacteria. This program of the Americans is classified. It exists in other countries of the former Soviet Union right along the perimeter of the Russian Federation. Pumping Ukraine with a military component hostile to us was very active. Let me remind you that President of Russia Vladimir Putin has spoken about this more than once. In 2014, probably, nothing would have happened, there would have been no unrest in the east of Ukraine, there would have been no referendum in Crimea, if the agreement guaranteed by the Germans, the French and the Poles had been implemented. But they have shown their inability to force Kiev to respect the signatures of the so-called Eurogrands. Now there is a conversation about how the European Union can play an independent role in efforts to ensure European security. I think that the European Union played its main "role" in 2014, when it could not force it to respect its guarantees. A putsch took place, putschists moved gangs of armed militants to Crimea when Crimea held a referendum, rejected the putschists and reunited with the Russian Federation. This is the EU's greatest contribution to European security. If this had not happened in Crimea, if it had remained Ukrainian, now there would be NATO military bases, which is categorically unacceptable for Russia.
Sergey Lavrov: This story dates back to much earlier. And not even in 2014, when a bloody coup d'état was committed in Ukraine with the support of the West, but in the early 1990s, while the USSR ceased to exist. The Soviet (then Russian) leaders Boris Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze were promised by their Western colleagues that there would be no geopolitical turning point, NATO would not take advantage of the new situation and would not move its infrastructure to the east. Moreover, it will not accept new members. The British archives published the relevant records of the negotiations. Once again, it became crystal clear.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken out on this issue in his public speeches. Instead of fulfilling the promise and ensuring stability in Europe, NATO undertook five waves of eastward expansion. Moreover, all of them were accompanied by the deployment of the armed forces of the alliance members in these territories. They said that "on a temporary basis," but it quickly turned into a permanent one – all the time creating a military infrastructure. Now neutral EU member states or states such as Switzerland are also trying to involve NATO in meeting the needs. The "Military Mobility" project forces Austria, Sweden, Finland to provide transport capabilities so that NATO can transfer its armed forces. "NATOcentricity" becomes all-encompassing. The European Union, for all its slogans about the need for "strategic autonomy of Europe", is by no means inspired by this topic and perfectly agrees to be an obedient "appendage" of the North Atlantic Alliance.
This period was accompanied by a frank provocation of the post-Soviet states (primarily Ukraine): they say, you have to decide who you are with – with Russia or the West. They sounded directly "head-on", starting from the first "Maidan" in 2003, and this was also the case at the subsequent stage, when Ukraine under V.F. Yanukovych decided to wait a little with the signing of the Association Agreement with the European Union, because it contradicted the long-existing agreement on a free trade zone with the CIS. Viktor Yanukovych understood that it was necessary to harmonize the trade regime with Russia and other CIS countries and with Europe. That is why Brussels organized the "Maidan" and the protests, which resulted in bloody confrontations in February 2014.
Then "peace" had already been achieved. A settlement agreement was signed with Viktor Yanukovych. He resigned from all powers and held elections ahead of schedule (which he would not have won). Poland, France and Germany, who guaranteed this agreement, after the opposition committed a coup d'état and trampled on their guarantees, remained silent, as we say, "in a rag." They even began to welcome the forces that came to power, by and large, the putschists. These putschists first of all announced that they were abolishing the special status of the Russian language in Ukraine, did not want to see Russians in the Crimea, and sent armed gangs there. Crimeans refused to obey those who committed the coup d'état.
That's when it all happened. It all started at that time. People who openly encouraged neo-Nazi sentiments in society, the creation of appropriate organizations marching on torchlight processions with portraits of Hitler's criminals with openly neo-Nazi and Russophobic slogans came to power. The West accepted all this without meekness. Many even supported and encouraged in every possible way. Then the topic of Ukraine's accession to NATO began. V.A. Zelensky came to power under the slogans of peace and the need to save human lives, to prevent the death of either Ukrainians or Russians. In the end, he became the same Russophobe as the government of P.A. Poroshenko. V.A. Zelensky called people in Donbass "individuals". Under the previous president, Prime Minister A.P. Yatsenyuk called them "non-humans".
V.A. Zelensky did not do anything about the ongoing bloody war against his own people. He, in fact, lied, promising to restore order when they signed numerous agreements with representatives of the Donbass. He violated them without blinking an eye. All these eight years, we have tried to appeal to the conscience of the West and to reason with this regime, which has acquired all the outlines of ultra-radical and neo-Nazi. There was nothing the West could do. I think he did not even want to do anything, because even then Ukraine (and until 2014) was used as a tool to contain Russia. The whole current situation has developed due to the fact that the West refused to recognize the Equal Rights of the Russian Federation in the organization of the European security architecture.
This is confirmed by the reaction of the leading NATO countries, primarily the United States, to the initiatives that President Vladimir Putin put forward in December 2021 on the need to honestly implement what was agreed. No one should, even choosing their possible military alliances, do anything that would infringe on the security of any other country. This commitment was approved at the highest level, signed by the presidents and heads of government of the OSCE countries within the framework of the NATO-Russia Council. The West categorically refuses to comply with it. Zelensky said that if Russia does not stop demanding that Ukraine fulfill its obligations, then he will think about Ukraine regaining its nuclear weapons. It was a little too much.
Q: Was that the most important thing?
Sergey Lavrov: No. It all piled up. There are drops that overflow the cup of patience. I would suggest considering all that I have listed as an everyday argument, a phenomenon that convinced us day after day that the West had set a course for using Ukraine to contain Russia, to create an "anti-Russia", a "hostile belt". For a couple of years, Ukraine has been pumped with weapons, and recently it has been especially active. The Americans and the British built military and naval bases there, for example, on the Sea of Azov. Through the Pentagon, military biological laboratories were created in order to continue experiments on bacteria. This program of the Americans is classified. It exists in other countries of the former Soviet Union right along the perimeter of the Russian Federation. Pumping Ukraine with a military component hostile to us was very active. Let me remind you that President of Russia Vladimir Putin has spoken about this more than once. In 2014, probably, nothing would have happened, there would have been no unrest in the east of Ukraine, there would have been no referendum in Crimea, if the agreement guaranteed by the Germans, the French and the Poles had been implemented. But they have shown their inability to force Kiev to respect the signatures of the so-called Eurogrands. Now there is a conversation about how the European Union can play an independent role in efforts to ensure European security. I think that the European Union played its main "role" in 2014, when it could not force it to respect its guarantees. A putsch took place, putschists moved gangs of armed militants to Crimea when Crimea held a referendum, rejected the putschists and reunited with the Russian Federation. This is the EU's greatest contribution to European security. If this had not happened in Crimea, if it had remained Ukrainian, now there would be NATO military bases, which is categorically unacceptable for Russia.
