Lavrov at UN Security Council Meeting on Ukraine

Speaking at the United Nations (UN) Security Council meeting on Ukraine held in New York, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov brought up the Western countries role in meddling in Ukrainian affairs, noting there's evidence they engineered the crisis in that country.

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"Since the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of independent states in its place, the U.S. and its allies have blatantly and openly interfered in Ukraine's internal affairs," the minister said and added that "all the facts of how the Ukrainian crisis has been engineered have long been public, but attempts are being made to downplay them by all means, to undo the entire history leading up to 2014."

"As U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland publicly and even proudly admitted at the end of 2013, Washington spent $5 billion to educate obedient politicians of the West in Kiev, he said.

The West ruined the implementation of the Minsk Agreement, "which consisted in the reunification of Donbas with Ukraine with guarantees of respect for fundamental human rights," said Lavrov, who pointed out that "it is directly responsible for the disintegration of Ukraine and the incitement of a civil war there." 

Western countries, led by the U.S., proclaimed themselves capable of deciding on the fate of all mankind, Lavrov said and noted that "today, the West resorts to statutory norms and principles selectively, [...] solely according to its selfish geopolitical needs."  

The foreign minister also warned about the growing risks of a global conflict. In this regard, he said that in the interest of steering events in a peaceful direction, "Russia insisted and insists that all provisions of the UN Charter must be respected and implemented not selectively, but in their entirety and in interconnection, including the principles of sovereign equality of states, non-interference in their internal affairs, respect for territorial integrity and the right of peoples to self-determination."

Lavrov noted the lack of arguments for a "sincere dialogue." Moscow "only listens to slogans: invasion, aggression and annexation. Not a word about the underlying causes of the problem, about how for many years they nurtured an openly Nazi regime that rewrote the results of World War II and the history of its own people," he added.

The West "avoids a substantive conversation based on facts and respect for all the requirements of the UN Charter. Apparently, it has no arguments for an honest dialogue," the foreign minister said.

Addressing U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Lavrov noted that Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky had signed a decree banning negotiations. "If the U.S. is so interested in them, I think it will not be difficult to give the order to cancel this decree of Zelensky," he said.

While they do not stop talking about the territorial integrity of Ukraine, "the former colonial metropolises are silent on the UN decision on the need for Paris to return the so-called 'French Mayotte' to the Union of the Comoros Islands, for London to abandon the Chagos archipelago and to start negotiations with Buenos Aires on the Falkland Islands," the foreign minister said.

The head of the Russian diplomacy asserted that if NATO had not rejected the proposals for cooperation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), "perhaps this would have made it possible to avoid many of the negative processes that led to the current European crisis, due to the fact that for decades they refused to listen to Russia or deceived it."

Lavrov noted as well that the Kiev regime cannot represent the residents of Crimea and Donbass, so the support of Western countries to Kiev after referendums in these regions violates the principle of self-determination. "The unconditional support of Western capitals for the actions of the criminal regime in Kiev is nothing but a violation of the principle of self-determination [of Crimea and Donbass] after gross interference in internal affairs," he said.