NEW DELHI, March 3. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has recalled how the United States and its allies bombed sovereign countries, and joked that if
the West's position on Ukraine was not hypocrisy, then he was not foreign minister.
"If you think that the United States has the right to declare any country in the world a threat to its national interests, the way it did with Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria - ten thousand kilometers away across the Atlantic Ocean, then you would not be asking any questions. Whereas Russia had issued warnings for more than ten years (and not just once on the eve of the attack, as was the case in Iraq and other places): ‘Guys, what you are doing is going to end badly."We are not talking about some faraway place, but right on our borders, in territories where Russians have lived for centuries. In a word, if this is not what you call a double standard, then I am not foreign minister," Lavrov said on Friday at the international political science conference Raisina Dialogue.
This was how he reacted to the conference moderator's question about the reasons for Russia's actions in Ukraine and what they could lead to.
"When did this conference spring up? Did you start it around 2014? During those years, have you been interested in what’s happening in Iraq or Afghanistan? Did you ask the US and NATO any questions about whether they knew what they were doing?" Lavrov asked.
He stressed that a war was being waged in Ukraine against all things Russian.
"Can you imagine, for example, Ireland banning English, Belgium banning French, Switzerland banning German, or Finland abolishing Swedish? Of course not. But no one lifted a finger, when the Russian language was completely abolished in Ukraine," Lavrov concluded.