MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/. The West needs all of these endless restrictions against Moscow to get rid of Russia as ‘an obstacle’ in its path to creating a unipolar world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an address at Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Wednesday.
"They need all this in order to try and remove, as they hope [in the West], the obstacle in the form of Russia that stands in their path to shaping a unipolar world," the top diplomat said.
Lavrov recalled that "the sanctions have always been there," and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about this.
"But their current scale, of course, is striking, because I didn’t expect this sort of imagination from the West. Previously, when they imposed sanctions, they constantly emphasized that it wasn’t against ordinary people, and that it was against regimes and against leaders, touting how bad they would personally feel for them if they did not cooperate, and as for ordinary people, they would always protect them, but [now] there’s nothing of the kind. They discarded all this repeatedly," Lavrov stressed.
The top diplomat spotlighted a statement by the Minister of Economy and Finance of France, Bruno Le Maire, who said that the countries of the European Union intend to start a "total economic and financial war" against Russia.
"Does it remind you of anything? This unprecedented mayhem reflects their anger, because the anti-Russia project has been thwarted, so any mistake is blamed, and all means are good. If you are a Russophobe, you can do anything you want and everything is permitted," Lavrov said.
"Over the past eight years, this principle has been proven on a daily basis in relation to what the Ukrainian authorities were doing, and now this Russophobic permissiveness is being extended to the entire so-called Western world," Lavrov said, about the ongoing developments.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address on February 24 that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation. The Russian leader stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories. After that the US, the EU, the UK and a number of other states announced that they would impose sanctions against Russian legal entities and individuals.