Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at an embassy roundtable discussion, The Ukraine crisis: Failed cancel culture, Moscow, February 5, 2025

Good afternoon,

We appreciate our dialogue on Ukraine. Such meetings often address other crises that the West tries to ignore or silence amid pushy and aggressive attempts to make Ukraine the centerpiece of discussions.

Let’s start with Ukraine, as we always do. This is our eighth meeting. Frankly, I didn’t realise we were that far along. During these roundtables, we discussed militarisation of Ukraine, rewriting history, and information warfare.

Today, we will focus on cancel culture which is, in fact, an all-encompassing topic. It doesn’t really have much to do with Ukraine, because the cancel culture agenda, which cancels everything that the West finds unsuitable, has been around long before the Ukraine crisis. Whenever bleeding heart advocates of democracy and rule of law ran into something they didn’t like, they just cancelled it and used their own rules instead, claiming that these rules should underlie the international order. That is how international law was cancelled. In fact, they sacrificed it to those very rules that, as we have repeatedly made clear, nobody ever saw, read, or presented to the international community.

But the West still clings to this motto. Let’s see what the newly elected Trump administration will do in this regard. State Secretary Marco Rubio recently stated in an interview that multipolarity was a reality of the modern-day world. This is an interesting statement. No American official has ever said anything like that before. But let’s wait and see how this will translate into practical policies.

The attempt to cancel international law is particularly evident in how the West, the United States, and their allies treat the UN Charter. Whenever they need, they pick the principle of self-determination of peoples, as they did in the case of Kosovo. When they need to support their underlings and accomplices such as the Nazi regime in Ukraine, they hang on to the principle of territorial integrity and ignore everything that the residents of Crimea, Novorossiya, and Donbass did when they refused to recognise the outcomes of the bloody unconstitutional coup and chose not to live under its rule, which aimed to eradicate everything Russian. Russian history, traditions, Orthodoxy, language, and culture were part of the lives of the residents of Crimea, Donbass, and Novorossiya for long centuries. Now, the West is set to cancel it all.

All they need in Ukraine is territorial integrity. Unfortunately, the UN Secretariat, including the Secretary-General, is strongly supporting the West in its Ukrainian policies, despite Article 100 of the UN Charter which says that the Secretariat must be impartial and refrain from taking sides, or receiving directives from foreign governments. It may well be that these instructions do not exist on paper. But Antonio Guterres and his top-ranking deputies representing the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other NATO countries in the UN Secretariat, are saying things that the West needs them to say.

Canceling the truth is one way for them to maintain their hegemony. On January 27, addressing the UN General Assembly on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Secretary-General Guterres followed in the footsteps of the Western speakers, including during the events held in Europe, and didn’t say who liberated Auschwitz. He didn’t say a single word about the Red Army.

Examples abound where provisions of the UN Charter and Security Council resolutions, which, according to the Charter, are binding on all countries, get cancelled. Thus, for example, the Security Council resolution which unanimously approved the Minsk Agreements was rescinded. A year after the coup, in February 2015, these agreements helped stop the war that the Kiev regime waged in Donbass using its armed forces against its own people. The Minsk Agreements, with our active involvement, helped stop that war. The Security Council resolution approved them. However, it became clear soon that no one was planning to implement them. Nothing was happening on the ground. The Kiev regime was violating every commitment it had undertaken under these agreements, and Germany and France, who acted as mediators and guarantors of this document, did nothing, either. In December 2022, former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and former President of France Francois Hollande, who signed this important document, proudly stated that they did not plan to act on it. They needed time to flood Kiev with modern weapons to be further used in the war against the Russian Federation.

Cancelling Security Council resolutions is also part of the policy to cancel international law which takes other forms as well. There is international law on ethnic minorities, and a large number of conventions, including the Council of Europe conventions, within the UN. There is an international legal framework to protect minority rights. This has been mentioned many times and is also mandated by the Constitution of Ukraine. However, anything goes in their efforts to erase, wipe out, and ban all things Russian, and our arguments are outright rejected.

At the last round table, we talked about the need to look at the root causes of any conflict, as President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping called for as part of his global security initiative. It says that for any conflict to be resolved, it should be studied in the context of its root causes before practical steps can be developed to remove them. The root cause of this conflict is that the West has purposefully sought for years – not just sought, but made effective steps – to create direct military threats to the Russian Federation right on our borders, on the territory of Ukraine, drawing the country into NATO. We have repeatedly pointed this out, warned and demanded that the alliance show it was making good on its pledge not to expand eastward, as far as to the former Soviet borders, now the Russian Federation’s borders. It was to no avail.

Suddenly, for the first time, President Donald Trump said bluntly in one of his first speeches, criticising the Biden administration’s handling of the Ukrainian crisis, that one of its biggest mistakes was insisting on NATO membership for Ukraine. He said if he had been president, this would never have happened, and there would have been no conflict. For the first time (I would like to draw your attention to this fact), a Western leader (not just any Western leader, but the leader of the United States, which is itself the leader of the entire Western world) uttered these words, which we welcomed. For the first time, the NATO problem was designated as something that the United States is ready to discuss in earnest. Clearly, the United States is the one to decide on the Western approach and, accordingly, Kiev’s stance on the issue.

Let me remind you that in our previous encounters with the Biden administration, with representatives of France, Germany or other countries, even before the special military operation, when we made official proposals on security guarantees for everyone, including Ukraine (and for Russia, of course), we were told that this was none of our business. I spoke personally with Antony Blinken in January 2022. He told me bluntly that it is none of our business, and no one was to poke their noses into NATO’s relationships with the countries that they want to have as members.

As the West had done before, they dismissed our reminders about their earlier political commitments under the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to ensure indivisible security, a principle saying that no one is to strengthen their security at the expense of others, and no organisation in the Euro-Atlantic region is to claim dominance, saying that those were mere political commitments. When we argued that it was something their presidents and prime ministers signed on to at the Astana summit in 2010, in fact reaffirming the same commitments approved in Istanbul in 1999, they said no, those were political commitments, while legal security guarantees can only be provided within NATO. With a smile. Duplicity and hypocrisy have always been typical of our Western colleagues. They probably find them invigorating.

The phenomenon of “cancel culture” has manifested itself in the annulment of the Security Council resolution that endorsed the Minsk agreements. This is by no means a unique Ukrainian method of action employed by our Western colleagues. Cancel culture, including the cancellation of international law, is now particularly evident concerning the situation in the Middle East.

Decisions of the Security Council, which, just a month or a month and a half ago, were recognised by all without exception as a necessary foundation for actions to establish a Palestinian state, have simply been cancelled. President Donald Trump announced that all residents should be removed from the Gaza Strip. He implied that Jordan and Egypt have plenty of land and suggested they settle these one and a half to two million people there, while the United States would turn the Gaza Strip into a “resort.” This follows other decisions made by President Trump during his first term, such as the recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory. Meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council adopted different resolutions. These resolutions have been cancelled.

There are many such examples, including those related to Western Sahara. In our assessment, this trend will only increase. I am not lamenting this; I am stating the reality. Of course, diplomats must primarily consider the facts on the ground, which should be the subject of negotiations.

In addition to the cancellation of all things Russian, regarding which Vladimir Zelensky is enacting laws, we observe the desire of our Western colleagues to also cancel everything Russian. This is evident in the prohibition of cultural events and the participation of Russian athletes in the Olympic movement, to the great shame of Thomas Bach and his team.

When in Paris, at the Olympics, a straightforward man enters the ring and beats women, this is deemed necessary because that is how Thomas Bach interprets the Olympic Charter. Yet the provisions of the charter that require the rejection of any politicisation of sport are interpreted by Bach in such a way that it allows him to bar Russian athletes from competitions, to forbid the anthem, the coat of arms, and other attributes of the national team.

Another element of cancel culture is the cancellation of justice. This aspect of the process has become particularly pronounced in relation to Ukraine. No investigations have been conducted into the causes of the coup d’etat, which nullified the agreement on settlement, guaranteed by the European Union, only for the opposition to seize government buildings the next morning. No one has investigated the circumstances of this coup, despite there being ample evidence of a carefully prepared provocation with the murder of unarmed law enforcement officers on the Maidan.

There is also ample evidence of how the same representatives of the junta, who unlawfully seized power, burned alive about fifty people in Odessa on May 2, 2014. There are videos on the internet showing how it happened, who did it, who set the fires, who shot, who finished off. No proceedings or investigation are being conducted. The Council of Europe timidly attempted to offer its services, even adopting some resolution, but the Ukrainian putschists ignored this organisation, which at the time still had a chance of being respected.

One of those who burned people in Odessa in 2014 is now a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, travelling around Europe, demanding that Russia be punished. A distorted reality is also part of this cancel culture, where facts are cancelled and ignored.

An outrageous example from the same category is the incident in Bucha. Two days after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev, in the suburb known as Bucha, dozens of bodies were suddenly discovered (as we discussed) neatly laid out on both sides of the road. A group of BBC journalists happened to be there, and they conveniently prepared a report that later caused hysteria in the West. Russia was again accused of all mortal sins. Bucha became the pretext for another wave of sanctions with which the West seeks to “strangle” Russia. We then began to inquire, having our facts proving that Russian troops were not there at that time. No one wants to listen.

For the second year now, we have been trying to obtain the names of the people whose bodies were shown by the BBC journalists. Just the names. Is that not a natural step in any investigation of any crime? We face a stone wall. I personally approached the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. He said he felt “uncomfortable” dealing with this issue. I replied that there was no need to “deal with it,” but to use his authority to request the publication of the relevant list. We officially addressed the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In September 2024, our Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General’s Office officially reached out to this Office and to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. We presented our arguments, unequivocally indicating that it was a fabrication. To this day, we cannot obtain the list of names, let alone a response.

According to the information that we receive from those who understand the correctness of our approach, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights does not want to share the data that the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine it controls used to conclude and publicly announce that this crime was committed by the Russian military. They have not given any names either. This is cancel culture over again – where justice and truth become cancelled.

The same applies to the terrorist attacks against the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines. No one is telling us anything. When we asked the countries that had officially announced they were investigating the incidents (Sweden and Denmark), they said that they had not found anything, so they scrapped the inquiry and had nothing to tell us. They said Germany was investigating it further. However, despite our multiple reminders and requests, including at the UN Security Council, that country, too, refused to announce any results. All we have to go by are news stories that occasionally pop up, quoting reports that “one Ukrainian woman and two Ukrainian men were taking a cruise in a yacht drinking wine, and suddenly decided to blow up the gas pipeline.” This kind of stories are actually published by reputable newspapers.

Speaking about Western journalists and the list of Bucha victims, I appealed to the Western media workers’ professional pride twice at a news conference in New York (1,2). I asked them why, as representatives of the US, British, European and Canadian media who never hesitate to demand explanations from the authorities with or without a reason, they suddenly cannot request the list of victims’ names. It has been almost three years since this tragedy.

I have no doubt that cancelling journalism and information is another tactic worthy of our Western colleagues’ modern playbook, not to mention that the Russian media outlets are being cancelled, too, just for expressing an alternative point of view. The West has long been fighting dissent. This crackdown reached its climax under the Biden administration, which convened ‘forums for democracy against autocracy,’ and former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that anyone who “opposed democracy” and refused to be at the democratic table with the Americans, would find themselves “on the menu.” I didn’t invent this. I do not even have to mention former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell’s remark about Europe being a blooming “garden” surrounded by a wild “jungle.” That jungle reference obviously included us. Clearly, cancelling decency and basic ethics is also part of our Western colleagues’ toolbox.

The US, the UK and Europe are deaf and blind when it comes to the streak of Ukrainian laws cancelling all things Russian that I mentioned: education, the media and culture, and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The OSCE’s decision on building indivisible security has been cancelled, too, by practical steps to expand NATO. The agreements that preceded the 2014 coup have been canceled, and so have the Minsk agreements and the UN Security Council resolutions, including on the Middle East settlement. This is a trend. The West is not just perfecting its methods exclusively for Ukraine.

We observe an overt desire to cancel our country outright, much as was the case in 1945, when the Second World War had not yet concluded. The summits in Yalta and Potsdam took place then, and the Allies celebrated Victory. Now documents have been published which reveal that the West was preparing plans for an attack on the USSR and its partitioning even before the war in the Pacific had ended. And these plans have now come back to life.

There was another historical epoch. In 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, the West believed that the new Russian authorities of the time would be “in their pocket.” That did not come to pass. Today, certain marginal elements – clearly at the prompting of the West – non-governmental organisations, former Russian citizens who have fled to Europe and the United States, are establishing structures aimed at “decolonisation” of Russia. They speak of seven or eight parts into which our country is to be divided. There exists a mindset of cancelling everything they dislike, everything that competes with them.

Fair competition has long since been cancelled by our Western colleagues, including through the imposition of sanctions. Now Mexicans, Panamanians, Danes, and representatives of a number of other countries will come to experience what this cancellation of competition entails. Our Chinese friends have responded firmly. Those who wish to dominate understand no other language. But this is already a broader topic – the architecture of world order, the fate of the globalisation system which the United States built, only to then cancel it once they realised it no longer served their interests. It benefits those who agreed to work within the rules of this system – free competition, respect for property, presumption of innocence, among many others. All that was propagated has now been cancelled, because it does not serve the interests of the United States. What serves its interests today are ultimatums. We will see how this unfolds. As yet, we have not had the opportunity to observe the actions of the new American administration in practical terms.

Beyond the desire to physically cancel Russia, to dismember it, the West has joined a campaign to eradicate Russian influence on the international stage. Ukraine is exalted as a beacon of human rights and European values. Let me remind you that among the values promoted by Ukraine are those of Nazism, when collaborators condemned by the Nuremberg trials are elevated to the status of national heroes. This, too, is a European value. I find this unsurprising. We cannot ignore the fact that neo-Nazism is raising its head in the West.

With regard to the drive to cancel all things Russian, Russian artists are having previously agreed engagements with relevant cultural institutions cancelled, Russia in sports is being cancelled – all of this is doomed to failure.

Unfortunately, just like the UN Secretariat, which blindly follows the Western agenda of canceling inconvenient facts and refuses to be part of investigating crimes, the Secretariat of the once-respected UNESCO is acting along the same lines. 

The head of this organisation, Audrey Azoulay, a French citizen, promotes the efforts to make Ukraine the number one item on the agenda, politicising this organisation and refusing to discharge her direct duties, including the protection of journalists’ rights. She remains indifferent to the numerous killings of Russian journalists in the special military operation zone, or to the demolition of historical monuments in Ukraine, including in Odessa, where the monument to Empress Catherine the Great, who founded the city, was torn down, along with the monument to Grigory Potemkin and everyone else who was involved in this project and built the city, created its ports, plants, factories, and developed these lands over a hundred years. Their memory is being erased. 

A week after the monument to Catherine the Great had been demolished, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay failed to respond to that act, as she was supposed to in her line of work, but she also included Odessa’s historic district, which was home to the monument that had been destroyed, on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. There is an element of provocation in what she did. It’s as if she said, “You wanted to see your Empress there forever, but I removed her.” Or, maybe she implied that it was done by Ukrainian Nazis, and she endorsed their actions. This is why UNESCO is in deep crisis. 

Despite this, Russian culture continues to move forward, including through UNESCO’s intergovernmental bodies. In 2024, at the World Heritage Committee meeting in India, another Russian site was added to the list of globally significant natural and cultural heritage sites, namely, the Arkhangelsk Region landscapes. In 2024, in Abu Dhabi, we took an active part in drafting a Framework for Culture and Arts Education. We participated in discussions during a special conference and felt no discomfort whatsoever, despite Ms Azoulay and her staff’s attempts to create obstacles. 

Despite the difficulties, we continue to hold Russian Language Days at UNESCO headquarters on Alexander Pushkin’s birthday. At our initiative, the Mendeleev International Prize in the Basic Sciences was introduced, and its third competition is currently underway. 

Speaking of our cultural and sports projects, many of your countries participated in the BRICS Games, which brought together a large number of athletes from over 80 countries. The Games of the Future were held as the first ever experiment to combine physical and cybersports. The second Games of the Future will be held this year in the UAE. You may have heard about the success of the World Youth Festival and the special efforts to expand student Olympiads. In 2024, at the initiative of Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the International Organisation for the Russian Language was established. The number of foreign students studying in Russia is growing. There are already more than 370,000 of them, and this number will continue to grow. In other words, Russian culture, humanitarian influence, and sports cannot be canceled. 

With regard to the events that we are holding to counter the attempts to make everything about Ukraine and to promote the true ideals of sports, culture, and scientific cooperation, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that two days ago, President Putin signed an executive order to hold the International Music Contest Intervision, which will make it possible for all countries to showcase their best musical traditions without any censorship. More than 20 countries confirmed participation and nominated their representatives for the contest jury. I am confident that this will be yet another platform for interaction among artists from many countries, a unique musical expo of sorts. We will be delighted to see your countries among the participants. I guarantee that there will be no perversions or mockery of human nature, as we observed during the Olympic Games in Paris. 

I would like to close by revisiting what I mentioned earlier regarding the Holocaust Remembrance Day event, where even UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hesitated to say who exactly liberated Auschwitz. A mass campaign is underway to undermine my country’s reputation and whitewash Nazis. 

During that Holocaust memorial event, an EU official avoided using the word “Nazism” and did not utter the word “fascism” altogether. Instead, he called Nazi Germany an “authoritarian state” just as they are referring to Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and several other countries represented here today. This attempt to erode and erase historical truth is a calculated effort to coalesce the West around this narrative.

We will not allow this to happen. This year in Russia and the CIS is dedicated to Victory in the Great Patriotic War, Victory over Nazism. A large number of events are planned to be held, and we will make sure to keep you informed about them so that you can partake. May 9 is the main date, when Victory Parade will take place. Many invited guests, including our friends, neighbours, and allies from the CIS and many other countries, confirmed their attendance.