Sergei Lavrov says the West is forcing the UN to expand “fake news” about the invasion of Ukraine.
Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine nearly four months ago, thousands of civilians have been killed and entire cities destroyed, while millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes.
But on Thursday 17/6, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov looked me in the eye and told me that nothing is as it seems.
“We did not invade Ukraine,” he said.
“We declared a special military operation because there was absolutely no other way to explain to the West that dragging Ukraine into NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western military alliance) was a crime.”
Since the Russian invasion of 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 their army has “seaized” the country. Lavrov recently made a stir when he tried to justify his Nazi insult to Ukraine’s Jewish president by making the ridiculous claim that Adolf Hitler (Nazi leader) had “Jewish blood”.
I told him about an official United Nations report on the Ukrainian village of Yahidna in the Chernihiv region, and said, “360 people, including 74 children and five with disabilities, were forced to stay in Russia for 28 days by the Russian armed forces in the basement of a school. .. There was no toilet, no water… 10 old people died”.
“Is this fighting the Nazis?” I asked.
“It’s a shame,” replied Lavrov, “but international diplomats, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Secretary-General and other UN representatives, are under pressure from the West.”
“Russia is not very clean. It is what Russia is. And we are not ashamed to show who we are.”
Has 72-year-old Lavrov represented Russia on the international stage for 18 years? and one of the targets of the Western sanctions announced after the invasion of Ukraine with her daughter.
The US accused him of perpetuating a false narrative regarding Ukraine as the aggressor and being directly responsible for the invasion of Russia as a member of the Security Council (RS).
Then I turned to the relations between the United Kingdom and Russia, which is on Russia’s official list of hostile countries. I suggested that it would be an understatement to say that relationships are bad.
“I think there’s no room for maneuver now,” Lavrov said, “because both (Prime Minister Boris) Johnson and (Liz) Truss (British Chancellor) are openly saying that we must beat Russia, we must bring Russia to its knees. “
Last month, the British Foreign Secretary said that Russia’s Vladimir Putin humiliated himself on the world stage and that “we must ensure that he is defeated in Ukraine”.
When I asked Lavrov how he sees Britain now, he replied that the country “sacrificed once again the interests of its people for its political ambitions”.
I asked him about two Britons sentenced to death by Russian separatists in recently occupied eastern Ukraine.
When I pointed out that Russia was responsible for its fate in the eyes of the West, Lavrov said, “I am not interested in the eyes of the West. I am only interested in international law. In international law, they were recognized as warriors, not mercenaries.”
I said that the men served in the Ukrainian army and were not mercenaries, and Lavrov said that this had to be decided by the court.
He later accused the BBC of not learning the truth about what happened while civilians in separatist-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine were “bombarded by Kyiv soldiers for eight years”.
I stressed that over the course of six years, the BBC was in frequent contact with leaders in separatist-controlled areas, asking permission to see what was going on. Each time our attempt was denied.
Russia accused Ukraine of genocide. However, according to self-proclaimed pro-Russian “officials”, eight civilians were killed in rebel-held areas in 2021 and seven in the previous year. He said that while every death is a tragedy, it does not constitute genocide.
I added that if the genocide had actually happened, the separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk would have been interested in our going there. Then why weren’t we allowed in, I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Lavrov.
‘This text was originally https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-61838948‘
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source: Noticias
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