🎙 Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the embassy roundtable discussion "The Ukraine crisis: Failed cancel culture" (Moscow, February 5, 2025)

Key points:

💬 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.

• Unfortunately, the UN Secretariat, including the Secretary-General, is strongly supporting the West in its Ukrainian policies. <...> 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The head of [UNESCO], 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.

• A mass campaign is underway to undermine my country’s reputation and whitewash Nazis. 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.

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