Moscow’s goal is to defend the Russians and Russian-speaking people in Ukraine from persecution, the foreign minister has said
Russia has no interest in seizing Ukrainian land but wants to protect ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people from persecution by Kiev, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
In an interview with NBC on Sunday, Lavrov was asked whether halting Moscow’s military offensive was the only concession it was prepared to make.
”We don’t have any interest in territories. We have the biggest territory on Earth,” Lavrov said. “What we are concerned about… is the people who live on those lands, whose ancestors lived there for centuries.”
Lavrov said Moscow’s goal is “to remove any security threats to Russia coming from Ukrainian territory” as well as “to protect the rights of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking people who believe they belong to Russian culture and Russian history.”
“The only way to protect them against this Nazi regime is to give them the right to express their will,” he stressed.
Lavrov went on to underscore that “Ukraine has the right to exist,” but it should be ready to “let people go.” He noted, however, that Ukrainian officials have consistently sought to dehumanize and portray as “terrorists” people in its five former regions that voted to join Russia in 2014 and 2022.
Since the Western-backed armed coup in Kiev in 2014, Ukraine has moved to sever centuries-long ties with Russia and introduced restrictions on the Russian language in the media. It has also sought to phase out Russian in schools, and impose broader curbs on its use in social life.
Kiev has also embarked on a campaign to eliminate cultural ties with Moscow, particularly through its controversial decommunization campaign, which involved renaming cities, streets, and landmarks that bore Soviet-era or Russian-linked names.
