Russia’s foreign minister has denounced the West as “an empire of lies,” whose overbearing attitude has become intolerable for the rest of the world.
Sergei Lavrov made the remarks in an address to the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Saturday.
The top diplomat cited examples of Western officials’ past and present deceitful behavior to prove unreliability of Western states.
Emphasizing that the West is “truly an empire of lies,” Lavrov said Americans and Europeans “make all sorts of promises…and then just don’t fulfill them.”
He added that even during the battle against Nazism in World War Two, Western countries plotted an offensive against their Soviet allies.
Lavrov added that Soviet and then Russian leaders “were given concrete political assurances regarding the non-expansion of the NATO military alliance to the east,” which turned out to be pure deception.
The senior diplomat went on by railing against the West’s globally divisive methods.
“The US and its subordinate Western collective are continuing to fuel conflicts, which artificially divide humanity into hostile blocs and hamper the achievement of overall aims,” Lavrov said.
The Russian foreign minister condemned Western countries for doing “everything they can to prevent the formation of a genuine multipolar world order,” adding, “The rest of the planet is sick of it … They don’t want to live under anybody’s yoke any more.”
Hitting out at Zelensky’s “peace plan”
Following his address to the UN General Assembly, Lavrov took part in a press conference, dismissing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s global peace summit proposal as unfeasible.
He also lashed out at Ukraine’s 10-point plan to end the war with Russia, saying, “It is not possible to implement this. It’s not realistic and everybody understands this, but at the same time, they say this is the only basis for negotiations.”
The plan calls for cessation of hostilities and Russian military’s withdrawal from those Ukrainian regions that have joined Russia through referendums. Moscow has rejected ceasing its operations while its forces are under attack by Ukraine, which is being fed with state-of-the-art Western weapons on a near-daily basis.
“West fighting against Russia in Ukraine”
Elsewhere in his remarks, Lavrov said through their their support for Ukraine, Western countries are directly fighting against Moscow.
“You can call it anything you want, but they are fighting with us, they are straight-up fighting with us,” Lavrov told journalists, adding, “We call it a hybrid war, but that doesn’t change things.”
Western countries are “de facto fighting against us, using the hands and bodies of Ukrainians,” Lavrov said, pointing to the billions of dollars in Western military equipment provided to Kiev.
He added that the United States and Britain are also providing Ukraine with intelligence support through the presence of their military advisors.
