Since Russia attacked Ukraine nearly four months ago, thousands of civilians have been killed and entire cities reduced to rubble, while millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes.
But on Thursday (17), Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, looking me in the eye, stated that things were not what they seemed. “We didn’t invade Ukraine,” he said.
“We declared a military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the West than dragging Ukraine into NATO. [aliança militar ocidental] It was a criminal act.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Lavrov has given only a few interviews to the Western press. He repeated the official Kremlin line that there were Nazis in Ukraine.
Russian authorities often claim that its military is “denazifying” the country. Lavrov recently caused an uproar when he tried to justify the Nazi insult to Ukraine’s Jewish president by claiming that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood.”
I mentioned to him an official United Nations report on the Ukrainian village of Yahidne, in the Chernihiv region, which states that “360 residents, including 74 children and five people with disabilities, were forced by the Russian Armed Forces to remain for 28 days in the basement of a school; there was no toilet, no water, and ten elderly people died”. “Is this fighting Nazis?” I asked.
“It’s a shame,” Lavrov replied, “but international diplomats, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Secretary-General and other UN representatives, are under pressure from the West. And often used to amplify news false statements spread across the West. Russia is not squeaky clean. Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed to show who we are.”
Lavrov, 72, has represented Russia for 18 years — and is one of the targets, along with his daughter, of Western sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine. The US accuses him of pursuing a false narrative of Ukraine as an aggressor and has held him directly responsible for the invasion of Russia as a member of the country’s Security Council.
I then turned to Russian relations with the United Kingdom, which is on Russia’s official list of hostile countries. I suggested that to say relationships were bad was an understatement. “There is no more room for manoeuvre,” said Lavrov, “because so much [o premiê Boris] Johnson how much [Liz] truss [chanceler britânica] they openly say that they must defeat Russia, force Russia to its knees. Go ahead, do it!”
It was just last month that the UK Foreign Secretary said that Vladimir Putin was humbling himself on the world stage and that “we must ensure that he faces defeat”.
When I asked Lavrov how he saw Britain now, he said the country was “once again sacrificing the interests of its people to political ambitions”. I asked him about two Britons recently sentenced to death by Russian separatists in occupied eastern Ukraine.
When I pointed out that, in the eyes of the West, Russia was responsible for its fate, Lavrov replied: “I am not interested in the eyes of the West. I am interested in international law. In international law, mercenaries are not recognized as combatants.” I retorted that they served in the Ukrainian forces and were not mercenaries, and Lavrov said that this should be decided by a court.
He then accused the BBC of not revealing the truth about what was happening to civilians in separatist-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine, “when they were being bombed by Kiev troops for eight years”. I emphasized that over the course of six years, the BBC had often contacted leadership in separatist-controlled areas asking for permission to see what was happening. Our entry was refused every time.
Russia has accused Ukraine of genocide. However, in 2021, eight civilians were killed in rebel-held areas, according to self-proclaimed pro-Russian officials, and seven in the previous year. While each death was a tragedy, he said, it did not constitute genocide. I added that if the genocide had really taken place, the separatists in Lugansk and Donetsk would be interested in us going there. Why, then, were we not allowed in, I asked. “I don’t know,” Lavrov said.
This text was originally published here.
