UNITED NATIONS, September 25. /TASS/. The decision to launch a special military operation in Ukraine was caused by the West’s inability to reach agreement and Kiev’s war against own people, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Saturday at the general debate during the 77th session of the UN General Assembly.
"Western countries’ failure to negotiate and the Kiev regime’s continuing war against its own people left us no other choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and to mount a special military operation in order to protect Russians and other residents of Donbass and to eliminate the threats to our security that NATO had persistently planted on Ukrainian soil," he said.
Lavrov pointed out that "the operation is being conducted to execute the treaties on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance between Russia and those republics in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter."
"I am convinced that any sovereign, self-respecting state that recognizes its responsibility towards its own people would do the same if it were in our place," he added.
"We cannot probably be forgiven that at the request of the United States and the European Union we supported the agreements between then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and the opposition that were aimed at resolving the crisis in February 2014?" he noted.
The Russian top diplomat emphasized that the accords, which had been warranted by Germany, Poland, and France, were "trampled on by the kingpins of the bloody coup, who humiliated European mediators."
"The West just made a helpless gesture and was silently watching how coup plotters began bombing eastern Ukraine, where [people] refused to recognize the results of the coup, since its organizers elevated the Nazi henchmen involved in the brutal ethnic cleansings of Russians, Poles, and Jews during World War II to national heroes," Lavrov explained.
Russia’s proposals
"Were we supposed to put up with Kiev’s policy of banning the Russian language, education, Russian media and culture, [Kiev’s] demands to expel Russians from Crimea, the declaration of war on Donbass, whose residents were proclaimed by the then and incumbent Kiev authorities not as humans, but as ‘creatures’ by their leaders?" the Russian foreign minister pointed out.
The minister pointed out that "Russia may have broken the West’s interests by playing a key role in stopping the hostilities unleashed by Kiev’s neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine and then by demanding implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures, which was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council in February 2015, but ‘buried’ by Kiev with the direct participation of the United States and the European Union."
Lavrov recalled that for many years Russia had repeatedly "suggested agreeing on the rules of coexistence in Europe based on the principle of equal and indivisible security, confirmed at the highest level in OSCE documents, when no one would enhance their security at the expense of others’ security."
"We put forward our latest proposal to make this principle legally binding in December 2021, to which we received an arrogant rejection," he concluded.