MOSCOW, December 15. /TASS/. The US views Ukraine only as a tool to prevent Moscow from rising on the international stage, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said.
"I would like to stress that Ukraine in and of itself was never of any value to the Americans, neither before the special military operation nor after its launch. It is just a tool for containing the trend toward Russia’s rise on the international stage and for preventing us from strengthening our international position and developing our economy," he pointed out in an interview with International Affairs magazine.
Ryabkov noted that the US-led West had used Russia’s special military operation as a pretext to unleash an all-encompassing campaign of sanctions and propaganda against Moscow, as well as a blatant, barely disguised hybrid war on a scale that Russia’s enemies had never attempted to carry out before. "If Ukraine had not existed, they would have had to invent something else [as their anti-Russian vehicle]," the deputy foreign minister added.
"In fact, in recent years the entire situation was headed precisely toward such a sharp large-scale confrontation like this. In my understanding, it is a clash of civilizational proportions," he went on to say. "In large part, the key question now is whether the current crisis can help accelerate the formation of a multipolar world where the historical West will [continue to] enjoy a significant and important place, but still a limited place [of one among many others], or whether the collective West will spill yet more blood - not its own, mind you, but the blood of other nations - to succeed for a time in prolonging the illusion of its dominance in international affairs," Ryabkov concluded.