MOSCOW, May 29. /TASS/. Special military operation that Russia is conducting in Ukraine proceeds according to a plan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with France’s TF1 television channel on Sunday.
Russia’s top diplomat stressed that in Ukraine Russia is protecting people and the Russian language, which has been targeted by direct discrimination and aggression by the Ukrainian regimes under [ex-president] Pyotr Poroshenko and [President] Vladimir Zelensky, and is protecting Ukraine from neo-Nazis. "As for the operation itself, it is proceeding according to a plan," Lavrov said.
Over the past years, the West has turned a deaf ear to Russia’s calls to make Ukraine honor its international commitments, Lavrov noted. "Our military operation was inevitable. We had been trying to reach out to the West for long," he said.
"Russia did not declare about a threat to its security overnight, it had been calling on the West for many years not to turn Ukraine into "anti-Russia," not to create a military threat to the Russian state from Ukraine’s soil, not to stonewall the Russian language, education and culture," Russia’s top diplomat said.
"The West didn’t give a damn about this. The direct threat on our borders, about which we had warned for many years, was fully ignored."
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in response to a request for help by the heads of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories, but aimed to demilitarize and denazify the country.