Lavrov’s Typical Exoneration of Russia’s Crimes

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s latest attempt at literary creativity is a classic piece of Russian state rhetoric and fabrications, blending historical revisionism, omissions, and inverted logic to frame Russia as the victim and Ukraine and the West as the sole aggressors and perpetrators of falsehoods. However, Lavrov’s essay is replete with misconceptions, misinterpretations, fabrications, and downright lies in the political genre of his contemporaries and predecessors.

You can read the article, which appeared on Friday, June 19, on https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/2120138/ .

Lavrov uses the term “NATO expansion” as an explanation for Russia’s global paranoia that has evolved into belligerent levels. These points rely on a fundamentally warped premise of international law and state sovereignty, twisting defensive reactions into offensive actions. He goes to lengths to dismiss Moscow’s latest invasion of Ukraine and the resulting four-year-plus war without ever citing Russia’s original typically ridiculous reason of looking for Nazis in Ukraine. Lavrov claimed that the West, notably NATO, goaded Ukraine into seeking accession to it and then provoked the start of the war that actually Russia began on February 24, 2022. The goal of this Russian campaign was to invade, occupy and imprison Ukraine in its notorious prison of nations.

Lavrov wrote that the term “NATO expansion” is the reason for every move by the West against Russia. He claims that in reality it is a “smokescreen for the geopolitical expansion of Western institutions.”

However, Lavrov denies the historical reality that NATO does not “expand” via imperial conquest, which has been Russia’s favorite method of aggrandizing land and peoples. In reality, sovereign, independent Eastern European nations have voluntarily applied to join NATO out of historical and well-founded fears of Russian aggression. That is why Ukraine is hoping to become a member and help the alliance with its battlefield knowledge and skills against Russian murderers. Ukraine wants to live rather than die in Russian bondage.

The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement of 2013 cited by Lavrov was negotiated over years by Ukraine because its nation and Verkhovna Rada overwhelmingly wanted integration with Europe. It wasn’t an ultimatum; it was a sovereign choice that Russia economically blackmailed Yanukovych into abandoning at the eleventh hour, leading to street riots. The subsequent 2014 Ukrainian Revolution also known as the Euromaidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity was a pivotal uprising in Kyiv that began in late 2013 when Yanukovych abandoned a deal to integrate with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. The demonstrations escalated into deadly violence in February 2014, resulting in Yanukovych’s ousting and a new, pro-Western government. It also contributed to Moscow’s first wave of its latest aggression of Ukrainian eastern oblasts.

Lavrov also claims the West wants a ceasefire “for one reason only: to prevent the collapse of Armed Forces of Ukraine.” If truth be told, this flips the concept of peace on its head. The global community called for ceasefires and troop withdrawals to uphold the UN Charter and stop the slaughter of civilians, not as a tactical military ruse.

Lavrov’s claims distort actual historical events and agreements to create a false narrative of Western and Ukrainian bad faith.

Rather than a pro-Ukrainian independence revolution, Lavrov labels the Euromaidan Revolution a “coup d’état” orchestrated by the Western powers. Actually, Euromaidan was a mass, grassroots popular protest against Yanukovych’s sudden pivot toward Moscow and his regime’s subsequent violent crackdown on student protestors. It is estimated that about 2 million Ukrainians from around the country packed Independence Square in Kyiv to voice their support for an independent Ukraine and outrage against Russia and Yanukovych. The Russian gauleiter in Ukraine ultimately fled the country after his police killed nearly 100 protestors, and Ukraine’s democratically elected parliament constitutionally voted to remove him and schedule immediate elections.

As a distortion of the Mink Agreements cited by Lavrov, the Russian official weaponized quotes from former German and French leaders Angela Merkel and François Hollande to claim the West “never genuinely intended” to implement the 2015 agreements and only wanted to “buy time.”

Truthfully, this is a severe distortion of their actual statements. Merkel and Hollande noted that the Minsk pause allowed Ukraine to build its resilience, but the historical record shows Russia repeatedly violated the agreements from day one by refusing to withdraw its heavy weaponry, refusing to return control of the border to Ukraine, and continually fueling the war in the Donbas.

Lavrov concocted highly distorted accounts of specific events, tailored to generate emotional outrage and vilify Ukrainians.

For example, the Odessa Tragedy of May 2, 2014: The text references “the burning alive of dozens of innocent supporters of closer ties with Russia.”

Truthfully, this is a heavily manufactured narrative. Independent investigations (including by the Council of Europe) showed that the Trade Unions House fire in Odesa was a tragedy resulting from violent street clashes initiated by pro-Russian activists against a pro-Ukrainian march. Both sides threw Molotov cocktails, and the fire was a horrific accident, not a premeditated, one-sided “burning alive” tolerated by the West.

Lavrov further asserts that the Anglo-French “Coalition of the Willing” was a plan to “rapidly deploy military contingents from the Anglo-French ‘Coalition of the Willing’ onto Ukrainian soil.”

Actually, this is a fabrication designed to stoke fears of a direct World War Three scenario. While European leaders have discussed various forms of strategic ambiguity or training missions, there is no joint operational plan to deploy British and French combat brigades to fight Russia on Ukrainian soil.

Lavrov composes terms such as “legal warfare” and Illegal Maritime Detentions. He complained about an “infrastructure” of accountability (Register of Damage, Special Tribunal) and accuses the EU of “detaining merchant vessels on the high seas.”

However, the framing of international legal accountability for war crimes and aggression as “legal warfare” is a rhetorical tactic to delegitimize the international rule of law. Furthermore, maritime enforcements in the Baltic or Atlantic comply with international sanctions regimes regarding illicit cargo and safety regulations, not piracy.

Lavrov’s statements and observations throughout his essay are completely decoupled from objective reality, relying on absolute denial of documented facts.

As Hitler and Moscow have attempted to do in the past, they really aren’t defending “citizens and compatriots.” The text claims Russia’s goals are to ensure “respect and dignity... including the right to speak their native Russian language. The reality in this case is perhaps the most glaring lie. Russia’s “special military operation,” as it calls its latest all-out war against Ukraine, has leveled predominantly Russian-speaking cities (like Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Severodonetsk), killing tens of thousands of the very Russian-speaking “compatriots” Moscow claims to protect. This group of Ukrainian patriots, many of whom are frontline fighters for Ukraine’s freedom, fell victim to Russia’s plans to defeat, occupy and claim Ukraine as its own territory.

Russia says it has explored “Every Diplomatic Avenue,” according to Lavrov. He claims Russia tried everything to defuse the crisis before 2022, the date Russia militarily crossed Ukraine’s border.

However, in December 2021, Russia issued “security treaty” demands that were intentional non-starters – demanding NATO permanently ban Ukraine and effectively roll back its borders to 1997. This was not diplomacy; it was a manufactured pretext for an invasion that Russia was already actively amassing over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders to execute.

Lavrov fervently sought to deny any Russian plan of imperial expansion. He claims that European assertions of Russia having “aggressive plans... far beyond Ukraine” are “nonsense, provocation, and disinformation.” Nonetheless, new former captive nations, Eastern Europe and “old” Europe are justifiably arming and preparing for a Russian invasion.

This often-repeated Russian assertion flies in the face of continuous, explicit rhetoric from the Kremlin itself, which routinely questions the sovereignty of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Moldova, and Kazakhstan, while state television regularly broadcasts threats of nuclear strikes and territorial conquest against European capitals. Putin, Lavrov and other Russian ersatz scholars and officials have argued that Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a nation are mere branches of Russia and the Russian people, and not independent entities. Anyone who says differently or seeks to change Moscow’s vision of this reality is threatened with nuclear destruction by Russia.

Lavrov operates on a total inversion of roles: the aggressor acts as the victim, and defensive actions by the victim and its allies are framed as unprovoked aggression. By rewriting the history of 2004, 2014, 2022 and today, Ukrainians’ defense their country against the latest Russian attempt to subjugate them, attempts to cleanse Russia of its documented violations of the UN Charter, the Budapest Memorandum and international law, and present its brutal territorial invasion as an act of self-defense.

In other words, nothing new is forthcoming from the Kremlin.