Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s reply to a question from International Affairs magazine, June 9, 2023

Question: Mr Lavrov, what can you say about another package of Western accusations against our country – this time because of the detonation of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant?

Sergey Lavrov: Western politicians and their baited media have long been accusing Russia of all kinds of “mortal sins” without citing any evidence. Just think about the Skripals case, the alleged poisoning of Alexey Navalny, the Malaysian Airlines crash, the terrorist attack against the Nord Stream pipelines and the staged murders of civilians in Bucha. Incidentally, as regards Bucha, we have asked UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres many times to intercede and demand that Kiev publish the names of those whose bodies the Kiev regime presented to the international community in early April last year. Silence has been the only response. Everyone is silent. No reaction. This is no surprise. As President of Russia Vladimir Putin put it, today, the West is a real “empire of lies.” The West has refused to release the facts in all of the above cases. All proposals for transparent investigations have been blocked.

Now we are hearing statements to the effect that it does not matter who blew up the Kakhovka HPP. The only reason for this is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Allegedly, if this had not happened everything would have been okay. Thus, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly made a peremptory statement to this effect. Now UN Secretary-General Guterres spoke in the same vein about this subversive act.

Meanwhile, nobody in the West or the UN Secretariat, for that matter, recalls that starting in the summer of 2022, the Ukrainian regime repeatedly shelled the Kakhovka HPP using, in part, American HIMARS MLRSs and then publicly flaunted these actions.

As early as last autumn, we drew the attention of the UN, officially, to the Kiev regime’s declared plans to destroy the Kakhovka HPP, but the UN officials looked to the West that ordered them not to respond.

I would also like to emphasise that in the same way, the UN Secretariat and the IAEA are not reacting to our almost daily statements on the shelling and attempted acts of subversion at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. We would not like for this next anti-Russia subversion to materialise.

The West rejects any fact or event that they and their Kievan protégés consider inconvenient – in full conformity with their notorious “cancel culture” as regards everything that does not match their geopolitical interests and their interpretation of history.

There is an obvious effort to lay the blame at the wrong door. They want to shed responsibility for the war they unleashed. But even if we follow the West’s “if only” logic, nothing of what is happening in Ukraine now would have taken place if Washington and Brussels had not supported the bloody state coup in February 2014, and if they had not brought to power ultra-nationalists under slogans of cancelling the Russian language and expelling Russians from Crimea. Nothing like this would have taken place in Ukraine if the Western leaders had not subverted the implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures and had not been drawing Ukraine into NATO to create a military threat on our Western borders. Nothing would have taken place if the historical West had not rejected Russia’s proposals on mutual security guarantees – both before, in 2009, and more recently, in December 2021. We could go on and on with this list of “if only.”

Western geopolitical engineers prefer not to notice the Nazi essence of the Zelensky regime. Meanwhile, he publicly called residents of Donbass “subhuman” and urged them and all Ukrainians that feel a connection to Russian culture to get out of Ukraine and move to Russia for the sake of the future of their children and grandchildren. The West deliberately ignores misanthropic statements by people like Alexey Danilov, Dmitry Kuleba, Alexei Reznikov and Alexey Arestovich. They do not try to hide Kiev’s intent to seize Crimea and Donbass and then destroy everything Russian there “either legally or physically.” Nor do Western politicians mention the fact that for nine years, starting in 2014, Ukrainian revengers – the moral descendants of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich – have been killing people in the country’s southeast. In some cases, Ukrainian ambassadors have yelled into TV cameras abroad that they would kill Russians wherever they were and added pathetically that they had to finally complete what their fathers and grandfathers had started.

Would the European Union with its moral lectures on human rights tolerate anything like this as regards Brits in Ireland, French in Belgium, Italians in Switzerland or Swedes in Finland? This is, of course, a rhetorical question.

 Let me repeat that we have become used to the hypocrisy and shamelessness of Western politicians, their undisguised double standards and their “rules.” Neither Emmanuel Macron, nor Olaf Scholz, nor Rishi Sunak, nor James Cleverly want to recall these blatant facts during an almost decade-long prelude to the crisis in Ukraine (we would like to hope they do this privately being ashamed for their behavior in those years, although the Anglo-Saxons and the European leaders that obey them hardly have any feeling of shame). The goal of this “forgetfulness” is obvious – to cancel the entire historical period during which the Nazi Kiev regime bombed its own people and flagrantly subverted UN Security Council resolutions.

 In this situation, we are bound to be concerned about the dual position of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. He is actually playing up to the West on the situation in Ukraine. Meanwhile, by virtue of his mandate, he must represent the entire international community rather than service the interest of the gold billion or be the guardian of a paradise garden surrounded by a jungle, as Josep Borrell put it. It is impossible to understand why the UN Secretary-General is playing these games. We urge him to look to the UN Charter more often so as to not forget the scope of his powers and duties.