Interview | Minister of foreign affairs, Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov

Is Russia winning the special military operation in Ukraine? What has changed since 2022?

When we launched the special military operation, our objective was to stop the war that the West had already unleashed at that time against us through the Nazi regime in Kiev.

We were honest in what we did and expected the other side to demonstrate the same. In February 2014, the West, represented by France, Germany and Poland, helped broker a deal between the then-President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, and the opposition for calling a snap election and forming a national unity government. European Union (EU) representatives signed this deal, but the very next morning the opposition decided that it couldn’t care less about the deal or the EU in general and went on to perpetrate a government coup. They announced a government of the victors instead of forming a national unity government. Their first initiative was to terminate the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine. However, at least 80 per cent of Ukrainians think, live and communicate in Russian.

This is how the war started. The republics that refused to accept the government coup were labelled as terrorists. Meanwhile, the Donbass republics had to experience a real war, artillery strikes, with air forces bombing peaceful cities. You know how it happens. Signing the Minsk Agreements took a whole year with Germany and France, with Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Francois Hollande acting as guarantors. The United Nations (UN) Security Council approved the Minsk Agreements. There was a belief that having these agreements implemented would serve our interests. The West has recently acknowledged that their only objective while signing the Minsk Agreements was to supply more weapons to Ukraine.

The war was quite long in the making and has been waged for a long time too. The West has introduced its usual tools including sanctions, blackmail and threats. In late 2021 and early 2022, the Kiev regime clearly opted for settling what it called the Donbass issue by force. We decided to defend our own security, since Nato has been trying to draw Ukraine into its ranks and already had plans to set up military bases on its territory, including on the Sea of Azov, which is on Russia’s doorstep. We launched the special military operation to protect Russians who have been living on this land for centuries since Catherine the Great added them to the Russian crown. The Russian military commanders and industrialists defended and developed this territory, while the Kiev regime outlawed these people by banning the Russian language across the board, be it in education, media, culture, or even everyday communications.

Today, we can hear Western leaders recognising that Ukraine has been facing an increasingly challenging situation. This is quite an elaborate way of saying that their idea of inflicting what they call a strategic defeat on us is doomed to fail. Western politicians understand this, still the West has been searching for the weapons it delivers to Ukraine across the world. Over 50 countries have been contributing to these efforts.

Earlier, the Americans were in charge, now they have appointed Nato as the focal point. It holds its Ramstein-format meetings. Several days ago, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said at a meeting “that they would never lose”. This means that instead of talking about inflicting a defeat on Russia, they are now focusing on how they are not suffering a defeat themselves. This can be viewed as a Freudian slip by Austin since he basically recognised that the Ukrainians are not the ones doing the fighting, they are just tools, and their bodies don’t have much value. The West keeps saying that it would not let their people die in Donbass. So, they pretend that they care about having fewer Ukrainian killed there, too. This is a racist logic that I do not want to discuss.

As for what to do next—there is a debate now about the planned conference in Switzerland, a meeting where Bern intends to bring together the representatives of the West and the Global South. However, despite the loud declarations that this new initiative is aimed at developing acceptable approaches, this is not true. I spoke with the head of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Ignazio Cassis at the end of January in New York, when we both participated in the UN Security Council meetings. He told me about ‘the plan.’ I immediately tried to bring him down to earth and make him see that they would not be allowed to deviate from Vladimir Zelensky’s formula, which involves Russia’s eventual capitulation, the payment of reparations, a tribunal for the Russian leadership and more. Cassis assured me that we were wrong. He said that “Switzerland, as a neutral country, would make every effort to ensure a realistic framework for discussion”. But the Swiss Confederation is no longer a neutral state. The country is now a