In an extensive interview with Aleksey Kondashov, the Director-General of the TASS News Agency, on July 29, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov compared the present hybrid warfare of the Western powers to the attempts to disrupt and divide Russia into different ethnic enclaves in the period following the break-up of the Soviet Union. “They claim that ‘with the Ukrainian character it is still possible to defeat Russia,’ which, they say, is an ‘aggressor’ and, after Ukraine, wanted to conquer all of Europe. The slogan of inflicting a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia has reappeared. The slogan of ‘decolonizing’ Russia has appeared, which once again openly implies the dismemberment of our country. A revival of hopes that the West also felt during the disappearance of the USSR, watching separatist movements emerge in the Far East and the Urals, not to mention the Caucasus. They cherished the hope that all this would now fall apart and they could ’pick up’ the pieces. In my opinion, they were even already calculating who should get what.”
This, and much else in the interview, was clearly framed for the Russian domestic audience, as Kondrashov introduced Lavrov as not only foreign minister, but one of the top five candidates on the federal slate of the United Russia party for September’s State Duma election.
Kondrashov pointed to the 2007 speech by President Putin at the Munich Security Conference, where Putin criticized the attempt to maintain a “unipolar world order,” as a turning point in the West’s view of Russia. “They thought they had us ‘in their pocket.’ When Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, he was absolutely open to an equal strategic partnership with the West. The fact that our former allies, the Anglo-Saxons to be precise, are now waging war against us through Ukraine with varying degrees of ferocity (London more so, the United States somewhat less so), pumping it with the most modern weapons, announcing that they will produce new, deadly, high-tech anti-missile systems specifically for Ukraine—this is unprecedented.”
Lavrov noted that with the failure of the Ukrainian forces on the battlefield, they would now resort more and more to drone attacks on civilians and open terrorism. “Now, when they’re talking about a ‘strategic defeat’ again, when they’re actively supporting our relocatees, who are organizing all sorts of anti-Russian communities in Europe, raising funds to continue some kind of ‘underground struggle’ to break up the Russian Federation, they’re making no secret of it anymore.”
