Sergey Lavrov: “We have facts about who was inside the building that was hit in Sumy. There was another get-together of Ukrainian military commanders with their Western colleagues who were there under the guise of mercenaries, or someone else”

Photo: MFA

Excerpt from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with ‘Kommersant’ newspaper.

Moscow, April 14, 2025

Question: You are saying the new US administration is willing to discuss negotiated settlement in Ukraine in addition to bilateral issues.

At a recent UN meeting on Ukraine convened in the wake of the strike on Krivoy Rog, a US representative made it clear that Russia’s continued strikes on Ukraine could thwart peace talks.

Several days later, a strike on Sumy followed. According to the Ukrainian side, civilians and children died. Does this mean Russia does not take the US warnings seriously?

Sergey Lavrov: Which exactly US representative made that statement after Krivoy Rog?

Question: The acting official US representative to the UN.

Sergey Lavrov: The United States has many official representatives. A US representative said something in Greenland recently and was asked to come back home and to start looking for a different job.

I’m not saying that this lady (I have no memory of her making the statement that you mentioned) deserves the same, but we are very well aware that outright lies dominated the approaches practiced by the West,  Europe, and the United States during the Biden Administration.

Over the past couple of years, I have on several occasions brought UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s attention to the fact that as chief administrative officer of the United Nations - the Charter describes his job that way – he must comply with Article 100 of the Charter and refrain from taking sides, but rather maintain a balanced stance and not follow instructions from any government.

I’ve known him for a long time. We’re on a first-name basis and have been working in various overlapping positions for decades. I told him that as someone in this office he cannot receive instructions from Western countries, but he is effectively following the Western countries’ instructions when it comes to the situation in Ukraine.

Now, again, after all the hullabaloo over “dozens of children and civilians dying in Sumy,” he made a statement to the effect that he was strongly in favour of stopping such violations of international humanitarian law, resolving the Ukraine crisis based of the UN Charter, and respecting Ukraine’s territorial integrity in line with the UNGA resolutions that address this matter.

International humanitarian law categorically prohibits placing military facilities and weapons on the grounds under civilian sites. Since the earliest days of the crisis, and even earlier when the Minsk Agreements were in effect, and we were hopeful that they would bring a peaceful solution to the problem, leaving Ukraine’s territory whole minus Crimea (they were reluctant to do this), there were “a million” facts of artillery and air defence systems deployed in city quarters next to kindergartens. The internet was full of videos showing Ukrainian women yelling at the military telling them to clear out from retail outlets and playgrounds, but they keep doing so to this day.

We have facts about who was inside the building that was hit in Sumy. There was another get-together of Ukrainian military commanders with their Western colleagues who were there under the guise of mercenaries, or someone else. NATO military personnel are there and are directly in charge of the operations. Everyone is aware of that. The New York Times provided an account of the US military personnel playing a key role in attacks on Russia from the very beginning. Without them, most long-range missiles would have never been fired.

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