MOSCOW, December 6. /TASS/. Russia has no intention to destroy the brotherly people of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.
"We don't have any intention to exterminate Ukrainian people. They are brothers and sisters to the Russian people," he said.
Lavrov recalled that Russia had warned for years that NATO's approach to its borders would create a problem, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had spent years explaining this on international platforms to people who dreamed of the "end of history" and their dominance. "When the coup d’etat in Ukraine took place, the Americans made no secret of the fact that they were behind it. There is a conversation between [the then US Deputy Secretary of State] Victoria Nuland and the then US ambassador to Kiev [Geoffrey Pyatt] when they discuss personalities to be included in the new government after the coup. The figure of five billion dollars spent on Ukraine after independence was mentioned as a guarantee that everything would be as the Americans wanted," the top diplomat pointed out.