MOSCOW, December 18. /TASS/. The West has come to grips with the fact that it will not be able to weaken Moscow as an independent player on the international stage, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Channel One’s Great Game show.
"Many were confident that the stronger, broader and more versatile the economic foundation is, the lower the chance of Russia’s relations with the West, that is, the countries with which its interdependence is growing, ever plunging into an armed conflict. However, the West did not hesitate to do that in a bid to achieve its main goal, which is now absolutely clear - to destroy Russia as an independent player on the international stage. Clearly, they now realize the futile nature of this goal, but they certainly can’t say it straight, doing a 180 in front of their voters ahead of election cycles for fear of losing their face and reputation," he pointed out.
The top diplomat also said that until recently, Russia and the West had been building pragmatic relations. "Western pragmatism, particularly that of Germany and Europe in general, should play its role the way it used to work in terms of our cooperation in Russian gas supplies [to Europe], as well as in equipment and high technology supplies from Germany and other European countries to Russia. All this strengthened our interdependence, which we recognized as a positive factor in the late 2000s and the 2010s, as the economic foundation on which security could be strengthened," Lavrov added.