Moscow sought security guarantees from the West before the Ukraine conflict, but was rebuffed, the foreign minister has said

NATO's push to turn Ukraine into a foothold against Russia amounts to a direct threat to national security, and left Moscow with no choice other than to start its military operation against Kiev in 2022, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

In an interview with the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet published on Monday, Lavrov insisted that NATO has long ceased to be a defensive bloc, citing its interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. "From whom were NATO countries defending themselves there? Who attacked them?" he said.

The US-led military bloc has also been expanding towards Russia's borders for years while seeking to turn Ukraine into a "military foothold" to contain Russia. "The appearance of NATO bases in Ukraine and its involvement in the military alliance represents an immediate threat to our national security. Such a state of affairs would be unacceptable for us," Lavrov stressed.

In 2021, weeks prior to the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, Russia sought to address its concerns by requesting security guarantees from the US and NATO, hoping to preserve Ukraine's non-aligned status. "Our initiative was rejected," Lavrov said, adding that the West instead continued to "pump Ukraine with weapons to forcibly resolve the issues of Donbass and Crimea."

Lavrov singled out what he called Kiev's crackdown on the Russian minority as another reason for the conflict. In the wake of the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, Ukraine was "persecuting and killing Russians," he said, pointing to the Odessa massacre that year in which dozens of anti-government activists were burned alive in the Trade Union House.

Lavrov also accused Kiev of waging war on the Russian language and culture, saying it has pursued forced Ukrainization, which has harmed other ethnic minorities as well, including Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Bulgarians, Armenians, Belarusians, and Greeks.

The Russian foreign minister stressed that a durable settlement is impossible without addressing the root causes of the conflict, including rejecting Kiev's NATO ambitions, ensuring the status of human rights in Ukraine, and international recognition of the "new territorial realities."

(RT.com)