MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/. The West seeks to "cancel" everything that happened before the Crimean referendum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an address at Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Wednesday.
"As for cancel culture, during all these past years, when we talked with our Western colleagues and reproached them for letting a deadly coup occur [in Ukraine] in spite of all those European values, they said: ‘You annexed Crimea.’ This means they are canceling everything that had happened before the referendum, that’s their culture," he noted.
"In their ideology and their logic, they cancel anything that exposes and proves them wrong," Lavrov said, adding: "This goes for agreements, they didn’t give a damn about guarantees, they didn’t give a damn about the European Union, or the coup and bloodshed."
At the same time, he emphasized that the referendum in Crimea had been held because of the looming danger threatening the lives of the peninsula’s residents. "However, this is what [Western countries] begin with, while showing no interest in what led to the referendum that they label as an annexation," he noted. According to Lavrov, "they consider February 24 (the day when Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was launched - TASS) to be the start of the current developments rather than November, when the [Russian] president put forward an initiative on European security, or December, when we presented draft agreements to the Americans and NATO, or the meetings between Russian, US and NATO delegations, when they strongly refused to codify the principle of indivisible security, making it legally binding, so that no state could not strengthen its security at the expense of others," Lavrov stressed.
In his view, "all this has been forgotten, as well as the fact that the Ukrainian authorities deployed 120,000 troops to the line of contact, shelling attacks intensified, open talk began about a Plan B, and now it turns out that Plan B did exist as a document has fallen into our hands confirming our concerns that hostilities were about to be carried out, and an attempt would be made to conquer Donbass by military force." "However, no one is willing to recall it all, they keep saying that Russia launched an invasion on February 24. This is some sort of game of words that the West is famous for, this is the method that is being used, it’s a culture based on cutting out historical periods that cause inconvenience, even the most recent ones," the Russian foreign minister said.