In an interview broadcast last night, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the use of a hypersonic missile in the war in Ukraine aimed to let the West know that Moscow is ready to use any means to ensure that it does not suffer a “strategic defeat”, Reuters reported.
Last month, Russia used a hypersonic missile “Oreshnik“ against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (Dnipro in Ukrainian – note ed.) and Russian President Vladimir Putin said it was a test of a missile that he said could not be intercepted. He stated that, if necessary, Russia can put other such missiles into action in “combat conditions”.
„The message is that you, I mean the US and US allies who are also providing these long-range weapons to the Kiev regime - they need to understand that we would be prepared to use any means to prevent them from let them succeed in achieving what they call the strategic defeat of Russia”, Lavrov said in the interview with the American journalist Tucker Carlson.
„They are fighting to preserve their hegemony over the world, over every country, every region, every continent. We are fighting for our legitimate interests in the field of security," he said.
Lavrov said the West had refused to discuss maintaining security guarantees for Russia in the weeks and months before a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, dubbed in Moscow a “special military operation”.
As Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border in early 2022, Western leaders urged Moscow not to invade its smaller neighbor, Reuters recalls. French President Emmanuel Macron met Putin three weeks before the invasion, saying he had received assurances that Russia would not take action to worsen the situation.
In his comments, Lavrov said that Ukraine had lost the opportunity to preserve its territorial integrity by twice rejecting proposals for an agreement - once before the start of full-scale war and then at the April 2022 talks in Turkey.
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„We did not start this war. For years, we have been sending warnings that NATO advancing closer and closer to our borders will create a problem,”, he pointed out.
Putin sent his troops into Ukraine from Russian territory and that of its ally Belarus, with the Russian president saying Moscow was protecting Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine and seeking to “denazify” the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv, Reuters points out.
In the course of the 80-minute interview, Lavrov also said that the West should abandon the notion that Russia has no “red lines” that it would not allow anyone to cross in defense of its interests.
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„If they follow the logic that some Western representatives have been saying lately, that they don't believe that Russia has red lines, that they announce their red lines, that these red lines are being moved again and again - this is a very serious mistake. , he said.
Lavrov called “senseless“ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's peace plan, first presented in late 2022, as well as the subsequent victory plan announced earlier this year.
In June last year, Putin said Russia was ready to hold talks with Ukraine, provided Ukraine recognized Moscow's control over the four regions of the country it has annexed, although without fully controlling any of them.< /p>
Originally, Zelensky's plan called for a complete withdrawal of Russian forces and recognition of Ukraine's 1991 borders. However, he said last month that Ukraine could hold talks and leave Russia in the territories it holds, provided government-controlled areas of Ukraine are brought under the “umbrella” of NATO.