No Way Back but a Way Forward

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has given an important interview

This is another (fairly) short note trying to compensate for the Western mainstream media’s systematically inadequate coverage of Russia and its politics. This time, it is a clearly important interview given by foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to the media holding “Krasnaya Zvezda” that is bound to mostly escape their attention. But not ours.

Published on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, Lavrov’s statements range widely. The topics he addressed included the causes of the Ukraine War, his country’s relationship with the USA (and what difference the Trump administration makes and does not make), and NATO-EU Europe’s obstructionism. As what is on the ministry’s website is only a selection from a longer conversation, we can assume that these statements are the ones that Moscow wants to make sure reach the public and especially Western decision-makers. They would do well paying very close attention.

The first thing we learn from Lavrov is that “we were not blind.” By which he means, as he explicates, that the Russian leadership was not “naïve” – and should not have been treated as naïve by the West: Moscow long understood that Western overreach was not acceptable in the long – or even, really, fairly short – term, and that something had to change one way or the other. Indeed, Russia knew this for, at least, more than a decade before the full escalation of the Ukraine War in February 2022. Lavrov mentions in this regard, as you would expect, Putin’s historic warning at the Munich Security Conference of 2007.