MOSCOW, March 30. /TASS/. Western countries are direct participants in the war against Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency.
"We can no longer tolerate the policy of the West, which once again decided to choose the Nazi theory and practice in order to declare this time a hybrid war against the Russian Federation. It is being waged by the hands of the Ukrainian military on orders from the Kiev regime," the top diplomat said.
According to Lavrov, Ukrainian leaders themselves admit that they will lose without continued supplies of increasingly offensive weapons to Ukraine. "This is a characteristic admission. It means only one thing: the West is a direct party to this war. Without it, it would have ended long ago, and would have made it possible to eliminate the threats that 'loomed over' the entire Russian-speaking population of the country called Ukraine after the 2014 coup," the top diplomat pointed out.
Lavrov reiterated that education in the Russian language, the use of the language even in everyday life was banned in Ukraine, not to mention the closure of mass media outlets. "This regime was used by the West not only to destroy everything Russian, which has always, throughout the history of these lands, existed in modern Ukraine, but also to create direct threats to the security of the Russian Federation on its territory, including the creation of military bases and other infrastructure of the North Atlantic Alliance," Lavrov stressed.
"We had no other option after all our attempts to achieve a political settlement through the implementation of the Minsk agreements and then in December 2021 through coordinating an agreement with the US and NATO mutual guarantees, equal and indivisible security were rejected," he added.
"Anyone who is interested in what is going on and who is even a little bit objective knows perfectly well what this is all about. In our case, we have nothing to hide. We are fighting for the security conditions for our country," the minister pointed out. "Over the past 30 years, they have been consistently ruined by the West, especially by the US, which destroyed all treaties on the strategic stability track. We are fighting in the special military operation for the fates of the people whom the Kiev regime publicly threatened to destroy and declared terrorists," Lavrov said.
Lavrov stressed that Russia protects the future of these people and their rights in full compliance with the UN Charter and international conventions to determine how they want to continue to live on the lands that have belonged to their ancestors for centuries. He reiterated that such self-determination already took place in 2014 in Crimea, while in 2022 the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, as well as the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions also chose their future. "This is a reality that no one can brush aside," he summed up.