Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's answer to a question from Belarus 1 television channel, Minsk, December 19, 2022
19 December 2022 20:31
2600-19-12-2022
Question: We are aware of the complicated background of the visit, which millions of people are following. In the past, our integration, the Union State programme, caused irritation. You remember the numerous fake stories about it. Today we are regarded as a threat. What are we going to do about this?
Sergey Lavrov: Let them invent what they want to suit their self-serving internal political interests. They are doing this to prop up their shaky positions on the international stage. We do not look up to those who have been proved incompetent and feeble, or who consciously encouraged Nazi trends in Ukraine. Since the beginning of the crisis, provoked by the state coup in 2014, Ukraine was regarded as a bridgehead against Russia. Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel has recently admitted, as if anybody needed more proof, that they needed the Minsk agreements she signed to give time to Ukraine and flood it with modern foreign-made weapons. This is it. Full confession.
The presidents of Russia and Belarus meet regularly. They have met many times this year. Their meetings are held in dedicated bilateral formats and on the sidelines of multilateral events of the CIS, the CSTO, the EAEU and the SCO. This reflects our resolve, together with our leaders, to strengthen the Union State. This has become especially important now. We must increasingly rely on our own forces and the mechanisms envisaged in the 28 Union programmes and make use of the additional opportunities offered by other integration projects in the post-Soviet space, namely the EAEU and the CIS, as well as the CSTO, which must reinforce its cohesion under the current circumstances and strengthen solidarity considering the "offensive" launched against the world order set out in the UN Charter. Attempts are being made to change it and to replace international law with the "rules" written by the West, primarily the United States, in conditions where Washington has been "shaping" the collective West, while Europe has been losing its independence at breakneck speed and can hardly claim to be a separate centre in a multipolar world, although we would like it to play this role.
It is necessary to see the history-making nature of the ongoing changes. They are not about whether Vladimir Zelensky remains in power or not. He continues to produce ideas, which, as I see it, show increasingly more clearly that he does not understand what is going on and does not care about his own people. His ideas are fresh proof of the Nazi and racist nature of the Kiev regime, which has been acting systemically to eliminate the Russian language, culture, education and media for years, ever since the state coup, and which regarded people in eastern Ukraine, who refused to accept the anti-constitutional coup, as "non-human," as Arseny Yatsenyuk said, or "subhuman," as Vladimir Zelensky said when he recommended that those who see themselves as part of Russian culture to pack up and go to Russia. This happened relatively recently but long before the special military operation.
The facts uncovered recently during the operation have proved convincingly that, as President Vladimir Putin has said, it was a timely decision, although we should have probably acted earlier. We uncovered plans for a military attack against Donbass. The Ukrainian military has publicly confirmed this. They also planned to use military force against Crimea. We know what this is all about and what we need to do.
The Union State and our other CIS allies have an important mission: to prevent the collapse of the world order based on international law and to ensure that our voice - the voices of Russia, Belarus, the Union State, the CSTO, the CIS, the EAEU and the SCO - is not simply heard on the international stage but is accepted as the voice of equal members of the new, multipolar world order based on the UN Charter.
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