MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/. Russia has repeatedly explained to the United States that the main issue in resolving the Ukraine crisis concerns people, not territories, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with RT international news TV Channel.
"US President Donald Trump publicly stated that it was necessary to forget about NATO and began to talk together with his team that the realities on the ground had to be taken into account," Russia’s top diplomat said.
"All this was discussed in Alaska. We again explained to our American colleagues that for us it is not so much about territories and land but that the main issue for us was about people who lived on these territories. Russian people who spoke Russian and raised their children in the Russian language developed these territories for centuries," Lavrov said.
As the Russian foreign minister pointed out, the putschists who came to power in Ukraine as a result of a state coup in 2014 called the people in Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya 'inhumans.'
"Then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko told them straightforward that Ukrainian children would go to clean kindergartens and spacious bright schools while the children of 'terrorists' - those in Donbass - would be rotting in basements," Lavrov recalled.
"Long before the start of the special military operation, Vladimir Zelensky said in an interview in 2021, while responding to a question about how he treated people on the other side of the front that there were people and there were ‘creatures.’ In another interview, he added that if you lived in Ukraine and felt part of the Russian culture and civilization, then his advice was that for the sake of the future of their children and grandchildren, they must get out of here and go to Russia. This is what underlines the current authorities’ attitude to all that is Russian - the language and culture," the top Russian diplomat said.
"This is what the current regime has consistently adopted since 2019 under Zelensky - a dozen of laws banning at all the stages Russian education, culture, mass media and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and legalizing the theory and practice of Nazism that imply, among other things, the installation of monuments that have already been established to those who were criminals and were convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal," Lavrov said.
"When the Trump administration began addressing the Ukraine issue (we had mixed feelings about its actions toward Russia. We have some romantics and people prone to illusions - I can say more about that later), it did decide to address the root causes of the conflict," the foreign minister said.