MOSCOW, June 5. /TASS/. The West has always openly nurtured the dangerous undertaking of suppressing and dismembering Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Izvestia in an interview.

"The West has never hidden that it wants to deprive our neighbors of the benefits of cooperation with Russia and wants them to pay the price of the gamble that the West has always nurtured and continues to nurture, meaning the suppression, and even better, the dismemberment of Russia. These thoughts began to revolve especially actively in the minds of Western elites after the Soviet Union disappeared, and the Commonwealth of Independent States was formed, and subsequently other structures - the Eurasian Economic Union, the Collective Security Treaty Organization," the minister noted.

According to him, the West started it "almost immediately, in the 1990s, with Ukraine." "Remembering perfectly the precepts of [former US security adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski that Russia and Ukraine, when they are together, are a really powerful force, but Russia without Ukraine is an average power. It is a fact that Ukraine has always been the most sensitive place for the West in terms of pressure on Russia," he said.

"When they were dragged into the European Union, we explained to our Ukrainian neighbors that if you become an associate member, you have obligations on tariffs and other trade issues that contradict the free trade area within the CIS," Lavrov continued. "And the duty-free goods coming to you from Europe will enter our territory, which we object to, because we have tariff protection for many of these goods. And they simply explained that the European Union, Ukraine and us need to meet and discuss how to get out of this situation."

The minister recalled that the head of the European Commission at the time Jose Manuel Barroso "said that it was not Russia's business to poke its nose into relations between Europe and Ukraine. That is, there has always been an either-or opposition [on their part] - either with us or against us. And all this remains to this day."