25 February 2022 17:09

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement and answers to media questions at a joint news conference with Foreign Minister of the LPR Vladislav Deynego and First Deputy Foreign Minister of the DPR Sergey Peresada following talks, Moscow February 25, 2022

Good afternoon.

I had talks with the foreign ministers of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics.

On February 21, having considered requests by Donetsk and Lugansk, President Vladimir Putin resolved to recognise these two republics as sovereign and independent states. Corresponding executive orders were signed. Based on these executive orders, diplomatic relations were established between the Russian Federation and these two republics on February 22.

Today, during the talks in this new capacity, we exchanged views on specific matters of interaction, including rather pressing issues such as steps to open embassies for the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic in Moscow and, accordingly, Russian diplomatic missions in Donetsk and Lugansk.

We also covered the provision of assistance by the Russian Federation in the form of humanitarian aid to the individuals who were forced to temporarily leave the LPR and DPR due to ongoing shelling by the armed forces of Ukraine. There are over 110,000 refugees from the two republics now in Russia. Previously, we provided sizable humanitarian aid to Donbass, which fell victim to an armed aggression by the Ukrainian nationalists who came to power as a result of the unconstitutional coup under an openly Russophobic banner, which back then didn’t particularly come to anyone’s attention.

As a result, Russophobia and neo-Nazism formed a foundation for the Ukrainian regime which plunged the country into a deep tragedy. A total trade and economic blockade of Donbass was one of the first steps that the masterminds of the genocide in Ukraine took on. It continued until very recently with a tacit acquiescence on the part of Ukraine’s Western patrons.

We were forced to send the bulk of humanitarian supplies to Donbass. Over 100 humanitarian convoys with over 100,000 tonnes of humanitarian supplies were delivered to the region, including medicines, other medical products, food, basic necessities, children’s goods and much more. Later on, amid the ongoing inhumane blockade and under the passive eye of the Western countries, including Berlin and Paris, which co-drafted the Minsk agreements, we have taken a series of measures aimed at alleviating the lot of Donbass residents in these circumstances and assisting in Donbass industrial output reaching the Russian market. An executive order to fast track the procedure to obtain Russian citizenship was adopted. I hope that the restrictions ensuing from the trade blockade announced by Kiev are now behind us.

Today, we discussed the practical tasks that stem from the treaties on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance, primarily, the drafting of a legal contractual framework for all areas of cooperation. Practice shows that there needs to be at least several dozen treaties of this kind in any event. The ministries and departments of the Russian Federation and their partners in Donetsk and Lugansk will establish ties and coordinate the rules and intergovernmental agreements. They will serve as a foundation for economic, military, military-technical and humanitarian cooperation. They will apply to cooperation in all the functional areas of ordinary states.

We reaffirmed our invariable support for the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics in their striving to strengthen their independence and ensure their rights. This primarily applies to the right to live on this land and follow the cultural, language and other traditions of the Donbass people, traditions that have taken shape over centuries and that the Ukrainian regime has tried to undermine in recent years.

We agreed to hold a series of consultations between our departments and organise practical training for the employees of the foreign ministries of the DPR and the LPR.

I believe today’s conversation was useful and to the point.

Question: President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev’s willingness to hold talks but there is a need for security guarantees that nobody is allegedly giving. Is Moscow ready for such talks? If yes, what are the terms?

Sergey Lavrov: President Zelensky has lied and cheated. He mentioned talks in at least two dimensions. First, he bluntly refused to fulfil the Minsk agreements while appealing to his Western patrons to convene Normandy format meetings, with or without a reason, and did not guarantee that these meetings would produce any real results. His appeals were designed to replace what he had to do to implement the agreements reached at the previous rounds of talks.

The second example of President Zelensky appealing for talks was to negotiate an accession to NATO and the granting of NATO security guarantees. All this was done in the open and quite recently. Everyone heard it. There were other threats in this vein, notably that Ukraine would be free of the commitment to not have nuclear arms if it were not protected in accordance with the Budapest Memorandum. I hope everyone read this memorandum. It says nothing about a commitment to recognise anti-government coups and meet a regime halfway that announced genocide against part of its own people by objecting to the Russian language, Russian education, and many other things that belong to Russian culture and are an inalienable part of Ukrainian society, including the Orthodox Church. Following the example of his predecessor, former President Petr Poroshenko, Zelensky is destroying this church. So there were plenty of opportunities that President Zelensky missed.

We suggested discussing security guarantees in December of 2021. He was well aware of this. The only condition was to fulfil the demands of the agreements that were signed at the top level at the OSCE. I am referring to the commitment not to try to enhance one’s own security at the expense of the security of others. He did not want to abide by this commitment. Likewise, his Western patrons did not want to fulfil their commitments as expressed in this phrase, in these words. Everyone was saying that the freedom to choose an alliance as a means of ensuring Ukraine’s security was sacred. This is why he is not telling you the truth now. In simple terms, he is lying when he says he is willing to discuss a neutral status. We proposed many options for ensuring security. President Vladimir Putin talked about this at a news conference following his talks with President Emmanuel Macron. He bluntly said that NATO’s expansion was unacceptable but that we wanted to seek, at joint talks and through joint efforts, security options that would guarantee the relevant conditions, opportunities and requirements for Ukraine, the European countries and, of course, the Russian Federation.

Our December 2021 initiatives on ensuring security aim at searching for guarantees outside the expansion of military-political blocs, primarily NATO. So, President Zelensky’s missed opportunities are well known and it is useless to try to lay the blame at the wrong door.

Question (retranslated from English): What is the purpose of this operation? Is it to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky? What is the exit plan? You say you don’t want to occupy Ukraine, but how are you going to withdraw Russian troops after Russia puts in a pro-Russian government?

Sergey Lavrov: I refuse to think that a journalist from a major media outlet like yours failed to read the address by President Vladimir Putin, which he made in early morning yesterday.

The answers to the questions you just asked can be found in his address. Once again, I draw your attention to the fact that made everything clear in his address. We cannot recognise a government that oppresses its own people and uses genocidal methods against them as democratic.

So that we are on the same page, please tell me where you stand when you cover current developments? Does democratic society, the values of which you advocate so vehemently, agree with the efforts to ban the use of a language spoken by the majority of the population? Do democracies that you represent agree with the decision to ban education in the Russian language, or in any other language spoken by the people for that matter, from, say, grade 5? Or, to make illegal the use of one’s mother tongue in everyday life, including shopping, talking to people at hotels or other public places? Is it customary in a democratic society to refer to people in a certain part of the country, in this case Ukraine, as “subhuman” or as a “species,” as President Zelensky called them? At our talks today we recalled President Poroshenko’s promises after he had been democratically elected. He said that the portion of Ukraine under their control will have everything, including schools, kindergartens, food, leisure and prosperity, whereas those (he pointed to Donbass) will sit and rot in their holes.

President Vladimir Zelensky said something along these lines when he demanded that those who consider themselves part of Russian culture should get out of Ukraine. Tell me, if English were suddenly banned in Ireland, how would the UK respond to that? Or if French were to be banned in Belgium? I do not think such a legislative initiative would have survived for more than a few days, or even hours. However, in the West, everything is perceived solely through the lens of their own selfish interests. That is, when you are infringed upon in any way, you immediately begin to cause a ruckus about it, but when the linguistic, cultural and religious rights of millions of people in Ukraine are infringed upon, your emphasis shifts from human rights to the “democratic” nature of the local regime. So, go ahead and read President Vladimir Putin’s address. Nobody plans to occupy Ukraine. The purpose of this operation has been openly declared: demilitarisation and denazification. This is because the never-ending torchlight processions, glorification of the Nazis, the cultivation of Nazi customs and habits in so-called volunteer battalions are taking place with tacit connivance, including from the media.

I’d be remiss not to mention a CNN correspondent who is cruising around Ukraine and is busy with something on the former line of contact. But during the past eight years, not a single Western news agency, including the respectable media in this audience, has covered the events on the line of contact. At the same time, our journalists worked around the clock on the line of contact on the side of the self-defence units and showed how things really were: how the Ukrainian armed forces destroy the civilian sector, kill women and children, fire shells at sites that must be protected under any circumstances given that it is a war crime to attack them. Things were about the same when NATO aircraft bombed Belgrade deliberately targeting passenger trains crossing bridges and firing shells at the television centre. So, the Ukrainian regime has things to look up to. President of Russia Vladimir Putin said we will see what comes of it depending on the circumstances. He reaffirmed that we are interested in seeing independent Ukrainian people led by a government that represents their diversity, so that they do not end up in a situation where they are totally governed by external forces seeking to encourage neo-Nazism and the genocide of the Russian people and to use Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia.

Question (retranslated from English): Let’s get rid of the euphemisms. This is not a special military operation, is it? This is a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. How can you justify the conquest of a peaceful nation, your neighbour? Do you believe when you are shelling it, Ukraine will be motivated to move towards the east rather than the west?

Sergey Lavrov: I am not an expert on euphemisms. We are far behind Anglo-Saxons in this respect. Take just the descriptions of all those interventions that were carried out against Yugoslavia (in the struggle for democracy), the destruction of Iraq and Libya (this was also a struggle for advancing democracy) with hundreds of thousands of people killed. So I will not even try to compete with you in euphemisms.

As for your question of what to do with the desires of the Ukrainians who want to be “here or there.”  It was necessary to think about this from the very start. President Vladimir Putin warned the NATO countries at the Russia-NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 that they should think twice before proudly stating that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO. This was presented to him as a great compromise that Germany and France managed to reach by replacing the US proposal on the immediate announcement of NATO membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia. At that time, he tried to bring them to reason and asked them not to treat a country that was just in the process of developing its independence like this.

At that time, the President of Russia said what he wrote in his articles: the Ukrainian state is very fragile and must be treated as such. But our NATO colleagues went straight ahead without any euphemism, with only one aim in mind (in terms of your words about Ukraine moving west or east) – to subordinate the Russian language, and to subjugate the culturally Russian east of Ukraine to its pro-Western, Bandera mentality.

It is obvious to me that this goal was already set at that time. To avoid a euphemism, we want the Ukrainian people, or as President of Russia Vladimir Putin said, all peoples living on the territory of current Ukraine, to have the opportunity to freely decide their destiny without any attempt to drive them into the vice of Bandera-like psychology.

Russia will ensure Ukraine’s demilitarisation and de-Nazification. We suffered too much from Nazism. The Ukrainian people also suffered too much from Nazism to shut their eyes to this and take it so lightly.  

Everything is clear as regards demilitarisation. No one would argue. Read memoirs by retired American generals and colonels; they start telling the truth only after they retire, unfortunately. Practically all of them say that the United States would never tolerate the deployment of weapons that could lead to the militarisation of their next door neighbours.

Since we have now recalled 2008 and the Bucharest Summit, I would like to remind you that later, then US representative at NATO, Ivo Daalder, called this Bucharest decision a major mistake in the history of the Alliance, without using a euphemism.

Question: Do you think the newly adopted Western sanctions on Russia will be effective? What do you think about the measures adopted in response to this special operation? Is a diplomatic settlement possible?

Sergey Lavrov: We have always been in favour of a diplomatic solution. Russia played the decisive role in laying a solid foundation for a diplomatic solution, which includes the Minsk agreements. Prior to the Minsk agreements, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, which had declared their independence, did not want to change a decision made by their people. Russia played a decisive part in persuading them to sign the Minsk agreements, which ensured Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, provided that Donbass was given special status with the right to speak the Russian language, to have its own law enforcement bodies and maintain special economic ties with Russia. This is what it is mostly about. This status was supposed to be part of Ukraine’s constitution, followed by an amnesty, lifting the trade and economic blockade that President Poroshenko had imposed by that time, and holding elections as agreed with these republics. This whole foundation was thrown out. Consistently, throughout the seven years that followed the signing of the Minsk agreements, we repeatedly tried to convince Kiev and then its Western patrons, Berlin, Paris and Washington, to force the Kiev regime into compliance with these core provisions, which underlay the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity while recognising the basic cultural and linguistic rights of the people of Donbass. No one lifted a finger to put an end to the brazen sabotage perpetrated by Petr Poroshenko and later Vladimir Zelensky. Our multiple calls (including public calls where we appealed to our Western partners’ conscience), unfortunately, remained a voice crying in the wilderness.

I don’t believe that constantly and vehemently rejecting any attempts to force Kiev into compliance with the Minsk agreements, Western politicians and diplomats hoped that things would remain like that forever. That we would forever put up with the oppression of Russians and attempts to make the Russian language illegal.

I want to ask our Western counterparts a question: what would you say if English were banned in Ireland? We made multiple attempts at achieving a diplomatic solution to the conflict; the military operations are designed, among other things, to restore at least some kind of a democratic arrangement that is devoid of elements of genocide, neo-Nazism or militarism. It will all come down to talks. President Putin said that we want to free Ukraine from militarism and neo-Nazism and to provide an opportunity for all peoples in Ukraine to determine their own future without outside pressure.

Question (retranslated from English): China believes talks must be held. If they were to take place, then with whom: the United States, NATO, or Ukraine?

Sergey Lavrov: There was a chance to hold talks until the last moment. On February 14, I reported to President Putin on the response of our NATO colleagues, primarily the United States, to Russia’s proposals to come to terms on fair security guarantees. They could have provided these guarantees honestly, based on the decisions taken at the OSCE at the top level. Honestly, rather than fraudulently, as the collective West attempted to interpret them saying that every country has the right to choose alliances. The fact that this right is limited by the obligation not to strengthen one’s own security at the expense of the security of others was simply not mentioned. They said that this is Russia’s “interpretation.” We do not accept such fraudulent methods in relation to documents that were adopted at the highest level.

Speaking of the Minsk agreements, the West likewise wanted to pick only the provisions that the Kiev regime was comfortable with, such as to have the border controlled by the Ukrainian government, which would allegedly take care of all concerns. “Forget special status, elections, amnesty, etc.” We have no shortage of negotiations. However, dialogue gave way to outright sabotage. Concurrently, Russia was accused of not complying with the Minsk agreements, which it was allegedly supposed to do. Some of our Western colleagues are known for being shameless. In this particular case, it went too far, considering the constant worsening situation faced by Russian speakers in Ukraine. I have already provided examples of what they did to the Russian language, education, and the Orthodox Church. Had our Western partners judged this all according to their own standards, they would have understood that it is impossible to put up with.

We are ready to start talks at any moment, as soon as the armed forces of Ukraine respond to President Vladimir Putin’s call to stop resisting and lay down their arms. No one is going to attack them. No one is going to oppress them. Let them return to their families. The Ukrainian people must be given the chance to determine their own future.

Question (retranslated from English): I am now in the capital of Ukraine. Recently, the outskirts of the city came under shelling. Does Russia plan to “decapitate” the Ukrainian leadership and replace it with a pro-Russian one?

Sergey Lavrov: Let me go over it again. You don’t want to listen to what I’m saying. In my previous answers to the questions posed by Western media representatives, I pointed out what President Vladimir Putin had to say. I realise that you have other things to worry about and would be hard pressed to read the statement describing Russia’s stance carefully. However, I encourage you to do so. Since you are in Ukraine, encourage your Ukrainian colleagues, primarily representatives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to read it.

No one is going to attack the Ukrainian people, or to degrade Ukrainian servicemen. It is about not allowing neo-Nazis and those who promote genocidal methods to run that country. Currently, the Kiev regime is controlled by two external mechanisms: the US-led West and neo-Nazis who are promoting their “culture,” which is flourishing in modern Ukraine.

With regard to what people currently in Kiev are feeling, let me highlight it for you once again: read President Vladimir Putin’s statement. There are no attacks against civilian infrastructure. There are no attacks against Ukrainian army barracks or other locations that are not associated with the offensive military facilities. The available statistics confirm this.

I would like to ask you, a representative of the free media, a question: why, in all these past eight years, did no Western journalists regularly cover what was happening on the Ukrainian government-controlled western line of contact in Donbass? All the more so, if you are now that horrified by what is going on in Kiev. Has anyone from CNN ever been to Donbass? Have you seen schools being destroyed, or women carrying babies in their arms being killed? Have you seen carpet bombing of a children’s beach? Has anyone at all been there?

I think that you should ask your questions based on the facts. And the facts are provided in the address by President of Russia Vladimir Putin.