Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “traitor to the Jewish people” and continued the Kremlin’s claims that he is “nazifying” Kyiv in an interview with Russian media on Monday.
“Volodymyr Zelensky made a 180-degree turn from a person who came to power with slogans of peace, with slogans like ‘leave the Russian language alone, it is our common language, our common culture’ and in six months turned into a pure Nazi and, as Russian President Vladimir Putin correctly said, a traitor to the Jewish people,” Lavrov told Russian Defense Ministry media outlet Krasnaya Zvezda.
Later in the interview, he said that a long-term European presence in Ukraine after a potential Russo-Ukrainian ceasefire would be unacceptable to the Kremlin.
“Just as they [the current regime in Kyiv] were brought to power on bayonets and pushed forward, they now want to prop them up with their bayonets in the form of peacekeeping units. But this will mean that the root causes [of the war] will not disappear,” Lavrov said.
He continued by emphasizing that the Kremlin found any EU presence in the Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine a threat to the Russian language and culture.
“When we ask these thinkers what will hypothetically happen to the part they take under control, they respond that nothing will change – it will remain Ukraine. I asked one person: will the Russian language be banned there? He said nothing. They cannot utter words of condemnation for what has happened,” he said.
“No other language has faced such aggression. But imagine if French or German were banned in Switzerland, or if English were banned in Ireland. Right now, the Irish want a bit more self-determination. Imagine if English were banned there – then the entire UN would be shaken to its core, with demands to condemn Ireland. But here, it’s allowed. You tell them this to their faces, and they say nothing.”
Delegitimizing Ukraine
The Kremlin has repeatedly claimed that Ukraine has no real culture or state, and it had always been part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space,” in a decades-old campaign to delegitimize the country’s sovereignty.
Lavrov’s interview with Krasnaya Zvezda comes after a heated meeting between Zelensky and US President Donald Trump. Russian officials praised Trump for his “proper slap down” of Zelensky and refuted the Ukrainian president’s assertions that the country was illegally invaded in 2022.
Kremlin spokesperson Dimitri Peskov told reporters on Monday that Trump’s shakeup of foreign policy “largely coincides with our [Russia’s] vision,” according to reporting from the Guardian.
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