MOSCOW, January 18. /TASS/. The United States has set a course towards unrestrained expansion of the anti-Russian NATO bloc and provoked the conflict in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference on the achievements of Russian diplomacy in 2023.

"Washington has set a course towards unrestrained enlargement of the anti-Russian NATO bloc and expansion into the post-Soviet space and provoked the conflict over Ukraine," Lavrov said.

He pointed out that Russia "did not put up with the use of the Kiev regime as a tool of creating direct threats to its security," and not somewhere across the ocean, but directly on its borders.

"And, of course, Russia refused to tolerate the use of the Kiev regime for wholesale crackdown on everything Russian: on the language, on education, on culture, on the people who for centuries have lived in the territories developed by their great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers, and which have always remained Russian land and part of the Russian world," Lavrov added.

He stressed that some wished "to turn Kiev into a tool to destroy this history, this joint memory, and to destroy any bonds linking the Russian and Ukrainian peoples."

"This is also a direct threat to our interests," Lavrov stated.

He remarked that in response to the measures that Russia had taken to protect its interests and its external border, the United States "unleashed total hybrid warfare in a bid to politically and economically strangulate Russia and to inflict on it a strategic defeat on the battlefield."