Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressed the State Duma on Feb. 19, reporting back on the Riyadh discussions and other aspects of Russia’s foreign policy. TASS provided a summary.
Lavrov began. “So far, as yesterday’s talks [in Riyadh] showed, movement toward normalization of relations on all fronts is beginning.… [Kiev’s efforts] to exterminate everything that is associated with Russia, Russian culture and the Russian world—and language, and news media—the extermination of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church” has to be stopped, he stated.
“For now, it is necessary to clean up the legacy of the Biden administration, which did everything to destroy even the first hints at, the very foundation of long-term partnership between our countries.… [Trump] is the first, and I think the only Western leader so far, to say publicly and loudly that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the previous administration’s cocky policy of pulling Ukraine into NATO.”
