Sergey Lavrov Quotes

The people I met with yesterday, including German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, expressed concern about this situation. If they are concerned, they should talk to their ally, the United States, and have the US sit down and talk substantively, rather than accuse us without any grounds from across the ocean. We are ready for such a dialogue and suggested considering the INF Treaty at the Russia-NATO Council. In response, our NATO colleagues completely blocked all communication channels between the Russian and NATO military...

In many Western countries, everyday Russophobia has become of an unprecedented nature, and, to our great regret, is encouraged by government circles in a number of countries.

President Poroshenko and his regime enjoy impunity and plan provocations like the one that occurred at the entrance to the Kerch Strait from the Black Sea. Literally a day after this blatant provocation, the text of the order...was found on one of the boats... It said that the boats should covertly, without requesting authorisation of the Russian authorities...Why?...There may only be one answer: they wanted to provoke a scandal.

We have absolutely no intention of — or interest in — crossing Ukraine's borders.

NATO foreign ministers met several days ago to support the US position. According to media reports, they did this after Washington presented certain irrefutable documents confirming that the treaty was violated. If this is so, we have not received any such documents from the US side. This is what we have been asking the US to do for a long time. We are still ready for a serious and professional discussion. Instead, the Americans resort to unfounded accusations, and again and again, from high rostrums, make allegations for the entire international community to hear about things that should first be clarified with the other party to the treaty. This would be a more appropriate, polite and correct approach.

Several years ago, the United States started accusing Russia of violating the INF Treaty, without providing any evidence. We basically had to pry the information from the US, information that would help us understand... what they meant. The US eventually mentioned the 9M729 missile, claiming that it had been tested on certain days at a certain testing site, and that the range violated the treaty’s provisions. Our data concerning these tests showed the opposite. The missile’s range is allowed under the treaty.

I didn’t invite anyone to pose for a photo together with me.

The West has declared war on us, on the whole Russian world. The culture of canceling Russia and everything connected with our country is already reaching the point of absurdity.

We have come up with proposals that we have repeatedly made available to the United States, including in Helsinki, when President Putin met with President Trump. I myself presented one such proposal to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. We re-submitted our proposals during a visit by US National Security Adviser John Bolton to Moscow in August and later in October, when he was in Moscow again. These proposals are about starting a serious, candid and professional dialogue on the INF Treaty, compliance with the START Treaty, and a number of other proposals regarding our approaches to ​​strategic stability. We got nothing in response from the US partners. We occasionally remind them about it. They keep saying that we need to correct our mistakes and stop the violations.

If the West delivers long-range weapons to Kyiv, the geographic goals of the special operation in Ukraine will expand even more.

The Russian people in Ukraine continued to be discriminated against across the board. Laws banning the Russian language were adopted and Nazi practices (theory and practice of Nazism) were established.

We did not invade Ukraine. We declared a special military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the west that dragging Ukraine into Nato was a criminal act.

We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the western countries to manipulate media, we understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media

The EU has evolved from a constructive economic platform, as it was created, to an aggressive and belligerent player which already displays its ambitions far beyond the European continent.

The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy.