MOSCOW, January 29. /TASS/. The West initially planned to admit Ukraine into NATO and was covertly preparing it for war with Russia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Turkish media.
"That battle was in the making for quite a while," he noted. "We know that these efforts got underway immediately after Ukraine had become independent. It was being primed for NATO membership."
The top Russian diplomat recalled that Ukraine’s declaration of independence "clearly proclaimed a policy of non-participation in military blocs, neutrality and renunciation of nuclear weapons." "This policy was announced by the Ukrainian leaders after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, and the Russian Federation and most other countries had it in mind when they recognised Ukraine," he added. At the same time, according to him, as far back as 2004, during Kiev’s first Maidan in support of the West’s candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who ultimately managed to win in an illegal third round of voting in the presidential election, influential Western politicians openly declared that "Ukrainians needed to choose who they were with: the West or Russia, Europe or Russia."
"This either-or mindset whereby they wanted to be in charge in all matters just the way when they ruled the world for over 500 years during the colonial era and the era of slavery. They want to keep living like that in the neocolonial period, living off the backs of other nations, including by creating all sorts of threats to their competitors," the minister continued. "Russia was, without a doubt, seen as a competitor in the international arena. They hoped that it, too, would fall apart like the Soviet Union."
These efforts were funded, in particular, by the US, Lavrov pointed out. "After she left the State Department, architect of Ukrainian policy Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland recently admitted for the umpteenth time that the United States had spent $5 billion on getting Ukraine ready for a coup and turning it into anti-Russia," he stated. "All of this information is readily available from open sources."
"Clearly, it is not about misunderstandings or ethnic strife between two neighbouring nations," Lavrov summarized. "It is about a geopolitical project which the West has undertaken repeatedly over many centuries in order to weaken and bring our country apart.".