Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov answered media questions after a meeting of the CIS Foreign Ministers Council in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on April 11, and summarized Russia’s frequently stated position on its Foreign Ministry website as follows:
“I reaffirmed Russia’s continuing commitment to achieving a reliable, solid and lasting settlement. Addressing the root causes of the conflict constitutes the only path forward, and everyone knows this. This conflict has been many years in the making. In fact, it all started when NATO stepped up its eastward expansionist efforts going up to our border, while also encouraging an openly Nazi regime in Kiev. This regime came to power following a bloody anti-constitutional coup, and started, among other things, adopting laws to cancel everything Russian and anything pertaining to the Russian world, be it Russian language, culture, or Russian-language media outlets, or the canonical Orthodoxy as represented by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and many other things.…
“The President of the United States Donald Trump keeps saying that this is what he is interested in. We can see that the United States is willing to go to the bottom of this issue, which sets it apart from Europe, including the U.K., which has opted for ignoring the root causes of the current situation altogether…. There is an understanding in the United States that there will be no going back to the 1991 borders, even if this objective is still on [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy’s wish list. Why? Everything else aside, there are people living in these territories, but Volodymyr Zelenskyy views them as [a] species rather than humans. He has called them this way many times even before the special military operation started. In one of his recent interviews, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the feeling of hatred towards Russians was his main driving force. And when asked whether he hated Vladimir Putin as a person, he responded by saying that no, he hated all Russians. He hates them all. Putting this man in charge of these people once again would be unthinkable. We will never do that. There is a similar understanding within Donald Trump’s administration. In their public statements they have said many times that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to come to terms with the territorial issue.”
Lavrov also reviewed discussion underway in the CIS and other groupings on responses to dollar-based financial warfare.
