WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/squatsons/status...68635130933248

https://twitter.com/squatsons/status...75994909732865

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https://twitter.com/Nikolai11449196/...06195215536128

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https://twitter.com/AZgeopolitics/st...90515669880834

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https://twitter.com/squatsons/status...07754439643136

https://twitter.com/squatsons/status...56188500258816

[Ravenlocke]

[url]https://twitter.com/AZgeopolitics/status/1597308436580294657

¤=[Post Update]=¤

https://twitter.com/AZgeopolitics/st...97318721568768

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/TheHumanFund5/st...13225439469569

https://twitter.com/TheHumanFund5/st...44573822353408

https://twitter.com/200_zoka/status/1597217086740496386

https://twitter.com/TheHumanFund5/st...02456189530114

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/ArthurM40330824/...01477201264640

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/SputnikInt/statu...00585271021568

https://sputniknews.com/20221128/ukr...medium=twitter

Ukrainian Commander Blabs About Kiev’s Plans to Try to Seize Crimea in 2023

In a snap referendum held in the spring of 2014, shortly after a US-backed coup in Kiev, Crimeans voted overwhelmingly for their peninsula’s return to Russia, with the vote taking place just over 60 years after the region’s 1954 transfer from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republic by Nikita Khrushchev.


A commander claiming to be “close to the planning process” of Ukrainian military operations has told UK media that Kiev has plans to attack Crimea in 2023.
“If we telegraphed our plans on social media and on TV, we’d achieve nothing,” Lieut. Gen (ret) Mikhail Zabrodsky, the Ukrainian Airmobile Forces commander tasked with trying to snuff out pro-independence militias in Donbass in 2014, said.
The officer, who had a criminal case opened against him in 2017 by Russia’s Investigative Committee for suspected war crimes in Donbass, insisted that a Ukrainian operation to seize Crimea was "not only possible," but "being prepared" for next year.
Authorities in Crimea have stepped up preparations to defend the peninsula in the event of aggression following repeated attacks on the region's infrastructure, including the Crimean Bridge, Sevastopol port, and local railway infrastructure. A heightened state of emergency readiness was introduced in Crimea in October, after martial law was established in the neighboring Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as Donbass.


The report comes weeks after revelations in leaked documents that British spies have been training an army of Ukrainian insurgents in the Black Sea port of Odessa to wage “guerrilla warfare” against Russian military and civilian targets in Crimea.
Crimea rejoined Russia in March 2014 amid unrest in Ukraine following the February 2014 coup in Kiev, which saw the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected government and its replacement with forces seeking to drag Ukraine into NATO and the European Union. In an emergency snap referendum organized by authorities on the peninsula, over 96 percent of residents voted to join Russia, with a turnout of 83 percent.

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/ArthurM40330824/...02905475358723

[Ravenlocke]

This was prevented in Melitopol,

In Melitopol, a series of terrorist attacks were prevented, which were being prepared in crowded places by the Ukrainian special services.

https://twitter.com/jaccocharite/sta...39713186054144

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/yanvonzeebroeck/...43551082901505

https://twitter.com/yanvonzeebroeck/...43712652079107

https://twitter.com/yanvonzeebroeck/...43898505879552

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/GeromanAT/status...26505654517760

And from Alexander Mercouris,

Crisis for Ukraine in Bakhmut as Russia Captures Settlements, NYT Admits Heavy Ukraine Losses

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QzXhhuT2aFU

[Mashika]

Posted by loungelizard (here)

Posted by Mashika (here)
Stalin is not well accepted in Russia these days,

Your claim contradicts the research by the Levada Centre in 2019.

It shows that 51% of Russians admire and have affection for Stalin, and 70% see his role in history as mostly positive.

https://www.levada.ru/en/2019/04/19/...-s-perception/

Posted by Mashika (here)
I think you are pro-nazi

Well, that's the first time anyone has called me that!


If I’m as stupid/poorly educated/dumb/juvenile/ignorant/lazy/dishonest/brainwashed/naive/laughable/ as you say I am (and if I’m that thick, how would I even know?),
it’s probably best to avoid responding to me as to do so would be a waste of time and energy

Posted by Mashika (here)
You may go away now

Trying to silence dissent is not healthy, and it’s not what this forum is about.

I love this kind of meltdown, please don't stop posting мистер ящерица, it is very entertaining to read

Trying to silence dissent is not healthy, and it’s not what this forum is about.

Context мистер ящерица, Context is important, do you know what context means and how it is used?

You said a lot of incorrect things in your other post, but it's not time yet to reply to those, please keep posting more so i can have more material for fun times

Domo Arigato, мистер ящерица

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/Nikolai11449196/...06195215536128

https://twitter.com/MoonofA/status/1597263273568542722

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/1...in-poland.html


Ukraine War - A Contentious Graveyard In Poland

An independent Polish news site, Niezaleizny Dziennik Polityczny, has an interesting piece about Polish losses in the war in Ukraine.

I can not confirm the reports veracity but since at least 2014 the site has regularly published several news and opinion pieces per day. It seems to be opposed to the current conservative PiS led government in Poland.

Below is the machine translated Polish text:

A shameful end. American quarters for Polish mercenaries

In early November, the regional media announced plans to create burials similar to American war cemeteries in Olsztyn. The reports sparked a wave of indignation, both among the city's residents and Poles across the country. "This is a necropolis for Poles? We are from a different culture ”this is how indignant users in social media reacted to the strange ideas of the city council.
...
The municipal cemetery in Dywity is the main necropolis in Olsztyn and covers over 35 ha. Today it is loud about it all over Poland, because soon it will look like a war cemetery in the USA. It has to be like in an American movie. A large lawn with identical tombstones on it. Without trees, benches, angels bending over the dead. The tombstones will be the same, they will only differ in color. Their manufacturers provided for only three: black, gray and red-brown.
The main reason for the creation of the American cemetery in Olsztyn was the drastically increased number of burials in the region, mainly soldiers' graves.

This situation has become a real problem for the local government of Olsztyn, where the 16th Pomeranian Mechanized Division is stationed. Almost daily military funerals combined with volleys of honor began to irritate the residents and provoked numerous questions to the city administration and the command of the 16th Division. To avoid additional publicity of the problem, the authorities decided to create a separate "American" cemetery.
...
After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February this year, President Andrzej Duda and Minister of National Defense Mariusz Błaszczak officially called on Poles to join the ranks of mercenaries and fight on the side of the Kiev regime. Among the fighters who went to war were professional soldiers of the 16th Mechanized Division and veterans of the unit living in the region.

During the 10 months of bloody fighting, according to information from publicly available sources, over 1,200 Polish citizens died in Ukraine, including soldiers and veterans of the 16th PDZ. The number of injured and maimed people also amounts to several thousand.


The number of wounded is probably three times the number of dead, though that can vary depending on the war's circumstance. It means that in total some 4800 men of the Polish contingent in Ukraine were wounded or killed. Is that one third of the Polish 'mercenary' forces in Ukraine? Is it more? Or less?

We don't know but I expect that quite a lot of regular soldiers of the 16th Pomeranian Mechanised Division in Olsztyn have been 'asked' to take part in the war. The division consists of one armored and two mechanized brigades plus the usual auxiliaries which makes it a 15,000 men strong unit.

The style of Polish graveyards is typical for a Catholic European country. Trees, individual graves, elaborate tombstones, candles and flowers.

It is understandable that people in Poland do not like the plans for an 'American' style military graveyard:

The authorities prepared "special honors" for them. Uniform quarters are being built in Olsztyn: There are to be two slab sizes. Larger (meter by meter) are graves for officers, smaller ones (60 cm by 60 cm) are quarters for soldiers. It will not be possible to cover the tombstone with cubes, or to sprinkle pebbles and plant flowers. Only grass is to be spread around the graves. Such an inglorious end awaits the mercenaries who died in Ukraine.
There will be 1,700 of such burial places only in Olsztyn. Therefore, many Poles who believed in the false promises of government propaganda will be victims of the provocative international policy of the PiS regime.

With plans for 1,700 dead Polish soldiers, beyond those 1,200 already buried, the Polish government seems to expect its soldiers to take part in an even more intensified and longer war.

[Mashika]

(i)logical thoughts of the western kind

[loungelizard]

Posted by Snoweagle (here)
You mean the Levada Centre that was banned in Russia back along for being subversive to the state and classed as an enemy of the state?

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/node/9497_en

Nope.

I don't know what you're thinking of, but the Levada Centre that I'm referring to is alive and well at Nikolskaya St 17, Moscow and has so far avoided the Kremlin's kiss of death.
https://www.levada.ru/en/about-us/

[Mashika]

Here's another credible report the UN can reference, and they also can say it came from "some sources" as the previous one, or the one about viagra that conveniently all the nazi-lovers have suddenly forgotten once the truth about the 'credible sources' came out

https://news.sky.com/video/first-lad...n-war-12757441

These people are mentally ill, no doubt about it. But also degenerate hypocrites with triple faced corrupted morals

There's a low and then there these people, little dirty sell outs for anything that can give them some more money and power to kill without any repercussions. This is the bottom at the pit for low, soulless human beings

[Ravenlocke]

Posted by loungelizard (here)

Posted by Snoweagle (here)
You mean the Levada Centre that was banned in Russia back along for being subversive to the state and classed as an enemy of the state?

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/node/9497_en

Nope.

I don't know what you're thinking of, but the Levada Centre that I'm referring to is alive and well at Nikolskaya St 17, Moscow and has so far avoided the Kremlin's kiss of death.
https://www.levada.ru/en/about-us/

To clarify about both links submitted by Snoweagle and Loungelizard,


Actually Snoweagle’s link is in reference to the same Levada Centre that you, Loungelizard referenced in your direct link to their website.

And yes Snoweagle is talking about the same polling organization known as the Levada Centre, which was included “ in the "Foreign Agents Registry" of the Russian Federation” in 2016 as archived in the link Snoweagle provided.

And even in the link you provided if you click on “About Us”,

https://www.levada.ru/en/about-us/

It explains in the History paragraph that in “2016 the Russian Ministry of Justice placed the Levada Center on the register of NGOs performing the functions of foreign agents. The center disagrees with this decision and trys to challenge it in court.”

[pounamuknight]

Expanding avenues of geopolitical research, I recently added Yandex to the toolbox. I should've done it earlier!

Ever wondered if Google doctors their search engine? Check it out

An easy image search experiment from Google vs. Yandex reveals geopolitical narrative manipulation vs. a bunch of pretty pictures

First off, Russia



It's waaaaaay worse for Iran

Finally, USA. Yandex image section first this time



Not saying don't use or use either or. Just be aware. Imperial narrative is definitely in the google of the beholder

[Mashika]

Most hilarious thing is when they are recording their live stream for 'trench log' tiktok videos and a mortar shell hits right next to their hole and they immediately switch to Russian and start yelling all sorts of things, they go from Ukrainian to Russian in like 10 milliseconds

You can't pretend all the time, and when stuff like that happens, you just forget about the fake persona and completely go into your original self, the one that speaks Russian as a first language, even if you fake not knowing it correctly like Elensky does when he records his nightly video message

[shaberon]

Posted by loungelizard (here)
Interesting … it doesn’t seem that you use the same degree of scrutiny when it comes to other sources quoted on this thread.
You’re happy to accept without question the word of Maria Zakharova, the Kremlin’s press officer, or TASS, or some faceless and
nameless bloke on Twitter. Do you have a problem with these NGOs because that both Amnesty and HRW have been accused
of anti-Western and anti-Israel bias?

Neither Amnesty nor HRW are perfect - they’re run by human beings, so of course they are flawed.

They are run by western superiority, and shall we say deceit by HRW assisting Syria's color revolutions for John McCain.

No, actually, "foreign propaganda" does not require the same "scrutiny" as anything from western sources.

You are witnessing the effects of Propaganda, which is the transfer of Reputation, having only limitedly to do with objective facts, which the individual cannot possibly make determinations about them all.

We are in an Empire of Lies. All I am trying to do is remove that capability, whether it means the Chinese NWO "takes over the world", or, you live in a desert, or, colonize an asteroid, or anything else you may be afraid of.


It is not feasible to say "accept without question", nor obviously would I have a problem if I thought Amnesty was effective at removing Zionism. So your guesses are wrong.

If you think Saints are a myth, I am not sure we can reach you at all. The main point is to silence the western echo chamber. It is not so much that NGOs are not paragons of virtue, they are tentacles for Capitalism to undermine humanity. For example, "New World Order" is a private company launched in 1980, behind what would be "Happytalism". That is the whole point of them. Penetration. Take the media, the schools, the industry, etc., in the guise of Democracy.


Against this, appearing in the English language in 1881:


The white race must be the first to stretch out the hand of fellowship to the dark nations...

...that curse known as the "struggle for life," which is the real and most prolific parent of most woes and sorrows and of all the crimes? Why has that struggle become the almost universal scheme of the universe?

...each of them, always with that one solitary exception, has through its hells and damnations inculcated the greatest dread of death. Therefore do we find that struggle for life raging most fiercely in Christian countries, most prevalent in Europe and America.

Those "intellectual classes," reacting upon the ignorant masses which they attract and which look up to them as noble and fit examples to follow, degrade and morally ruin those they ought to protect and guide.

The world in general and Christendom especially, left for two thousand years to the regime of a personal God as well as its political and social systems based on that idea, has now proved a failure.



Let us hold our breath and swallow whole the following observations from veteran German statesman Oskar Lafontaine:



“Of course, I also mean the conflict in Ukraine, which began with the Maidan putsch in Kiev in 2014. Since then, the US and its Western vassals have been arming Ukraine and systematically preparing it for confrontation with Russia. Ukraine thus became a de facto, if not de jure, member of NATO. This backstory has been studiously ignored by Western politicians and the mainstream media,” Lafontaine told Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten in an interview published Sunday.

“For more than 100 years, it has been the declared aim of US policy to prevent German business and technology from merging with Russian raw materials at all cost. It is perfectly clear that, if you take this history into account, we are dealing with a US proxy war against Russia which has been prepared for a long time,” Lafontaine said.

“It is unforgivable that the SPD in particular betrayed the legacy of Willy Brandt and his policy of détente, and did not even seriously insist on compliance with the Minsk Agreements,” the politician said, referring to the 2015 peace agreements meant to restore peace to the Donbass.

Lafontaine slammed the German government over its limp-wristed response to the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, which he characterized as a “declaration of war on Germany.” It was “pathetic and cowardly” of the federal government to try to “sweep incident under the carpet,” despite evidence that “the USA either carried out the attack directly or greenlit it,” the politician said.

“It was a hostile act against the Federal Republic, and not only against us, and once again makes clear that we must free ourselves from American tutelage,” Lafontaine stressed. The politician pressed his country’s leaders to force the removal of all US military bases and nuclear weapons from German soil, and called for the creation of a European security architecture with France, separate from NATO, which he called an “obsolete” alliance that acts as a “tool to enforce the US’s claim to remain the sole power in the world.”

Lafontaine admitted that freeing Germany from Washington’s grip wouldn’t be easy, but stressed that he can’t see “any alternative” to such a radical step. “If we and other European countries continue to remain under US tutelage, they will push us over a cliff to protect their own interests,” he said.


“To use a hackneyed expression: We are experiencing the birth pangs of the transitional phase from a unipolar to a multipolar world order. And the question arises whether we will have a place of our own in this new world order, or be drawn into Washington’s conflicts with Moscow and Beijing as American vassals,” the politician emphasized.

Recalling his decades of experience in politics, Lafontaine lamented in decades past, German leaders, “at least in some conflicts, had German interests in mind, and did not throw them overboard in anticipatory obedience” to Washington. “You need to have a backbone when you are the head of a country. The image of Chancellor Scholz standing like a schoolboy next to President Biden when he announced that nothing would come of Nord Stream 2 was humiliating.”

Ukraine Disaster

Asked whether he believed Washington has achieved its aims in Ukraine, Lafontaine said that the answer was both “yes and no,” with the principle successes being the ruined relations between Russia and the European Union, and the “sidelining” of Berlin and Brussels “as the US’s potential geostrategic and economic rivals, for the time being.”

“They are setting the policies of EU states even more than before the Ukraine conflict (thanks also to compliant politicians in Berlin and Brussels). They can also sell their dirty fracking-derived gas, and the US defense industry is doing great business,” the politician said.

“On the other hand, they have not succeeded in ‘ruining Russia’, as [German Foreign Minister Annalena] Baerbock put it…overthrowing [Vladimir] Putin and installing a puppet government in Moscow to get better access to Russian raw materials, as was the case in [Boris] Yeltsin’s time,” Lafontaine said.

“And I have the impression that Washington has now realized that they are biting on granite here. Despite massive arms deliveries to Ukraine and the dispatch of numerous ‘military advisors’, Russia, which is a nuclear power, cannot be defeated militarily. In addition, Western sanctions are proving to be a boomerang: they hurt Western states more than Russia and will cause deindustrialization, unemployment and poverty. Working people in Europe are paying the price for the world power ambitions of a mad elite in Washington and the cowardice of European leaders,” Lafontaine concluded.


Information from the Delta C&C system shows:


The leaked documents confirmed that the Kakhovskaya dam was among the targets to destroy.

In its turn, the Russian side has all means to divide Ukraine in two parts by several missile strikes on the bridges and dams on the Dnieper River. Such attacks would leave the Ukrainian military without possibility to transfer any military equipment and personnel to the war-torn regions in the East. Such attacks would immediately bring Russia victory in the war in Ukraine and would save lives of Russian servicemen. However, the destruction of Ukrainian dams would also claim lives of hundreds of civilians. That’s why the Russian military does not launch its missiles on such facilities.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has already shown that Russia is fighting to protect people, while the United States and NATO pay no attention to the cost of human lives in the war they have ignited in Ukraine.



Elsewhere, for NATO of Kharkov:


The reinforcement was mainly made up of foreign military, including former soldiers of the Bosnian and Albanian armies, as well as soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division “Getica” and the 2nd Mountain Rifle Brigade “Sarmizegetuza” from Romania.

The command of the operation, presumably, was entrusted to Polish officers from Rzeszow, who had previously served in the 21st the Podgalski rifle brigade.


On November 26, the Russian military reported a high-precision missile strike on the temporary deployment of Polish mercenaries near the village of Velikiye Khutora in the Kharkov region. Out of about 1,000 mercenaries, several hundred were killed and seriously injured.

[Bill Ryan]

Col. Douglas Macgregor on the videos of the cold-blooded murder of surrendered Russian soldiers, posted online by the Ukrainians themselves and widely circulated in Russia. (For anyone who wants to take a deep breath and see this with their own eyes, the executions are shown in the opening segment of the video embedded in this post.)

(@loungelizard, wake up.)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=llHGDQM63Bo

[Helvetic]

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview for the film, Nazism on Trial, Moscow, November 26, 2022

Source: mid.ru

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlZtkY_Nnco

Question: Today, we are being told (primarily by the Ukrainians) that the Russians have “made things up” and there are no Nazis in Ukraine and there have never been any. However, we remember history well. We can see that over the years of independence they have brought up vast numbers of Nazi-aligned organisations that enjoy support at the state level. For instance, the oligarch-sponsored Azov was under the Ukrainian Interior Minister’s wing. How did this become possible in a place that is called a European country? How did it happen? Did external forces influence it in any way?

Sergey Lavrov: Absolutely. Nothing would have happened without external forces, neither glorification of the Nazis, or the transformation of Nazism into the current Ukrainian government’s theory and practice. This has been the case since the creation of the Soviet Union. President Putin repeatedly made clear how Ukraine was formed within the borders in which it found itself at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Back then one of the masterminds of the US approach to international affairs and US dominance Zbigniew Brzezinski said that Russia with Ukraine was a superpower, but without Ukraine it was just a regional player. It was Washington's hands-on policy. In many ways, this position prevented our approach - “that’s the way life goes” - from coming to fruition after December 1991. We wanted to see Ukraine a good neighbour of ours and a reliable friend. Our “family ties” were tight, and so many people’s lives were intertwined. It was something we really wanted. I know what I’m talking about, because back then I was working on the issues that arose in the post-Soviet space.

The Americans sought to achieve the opposite outcome and to make Ukraine “anti-Russia.” The then Ukrainian leaders fell for the smooth tactics of the Americans. Back when no one could see Ukraine becoming an “anti-Russia,” President Leonid Kuchma wrote a book titled “Ukraine is not Russia.” Perhaps, everyone is striving to attain some kind of a romantic goal and to become part of some culture, but even then the subtext of this “tagline” was that there was Europe, and there was Russia.

Talk at the OSCE in the late 1990s about the need to build a common economic and humanitarian space, as well as a security space, spanning the entire Eurasian continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, turned out to be just that, empty talk. Behind these beautiful words, what the West really means was “either you’re with us or you’re with Russia.” Back in 2003, early on during another presidential race in Ukraine, the EU official figures, including Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, publicly stated that the Ukrainian people should decide who they want to be with: Europe or Russia. This particular “either-or” and “whoever is not with us is a Moskali” philosophy that is deeply embedded in European and Western minds has played a major, if not decisive, role in getting us where we are now. The neo-Nazi ideology is made part of Ukrainian life in every possible way.

You mentioned volunteer and nationalist battalions and regiments like Azov. When the coup took place in 2014, Azov was already known as an extremist organisation. In 2015, when deciding on the allocation of aid to Ukraine, including military aid, the US House of Representatives introduced a special clause to remove this formation from the list of recipients. Azov was put on the list of terrorist organisations in a number of European countries and Japan. Now, look at the Japanese outdo everyone. After the special military operation began, they officially apologised to the Azov members for putting Azov on the terrorist lists and assured them that “this will not happen again.”

Under what banners did the putschists come to power in February 2014? Their first demand was to strip the Russian language of its regional status, which it had under Ukrainian law. The hastily cobbled together Verkhovna Rada chose not to rescind this law, but the instincts of the people who illegally grabbed power became clear instantly. One of the coup leaders and head of the Right Sector (which is outlawed in our country just like the Azov regiment) Dmitry Yarosh said that Russians will never think like Ukrainians, will not speak Ukrainian and will not honour Ukrainian heroes, so the Russians must be pushed out of Crimea. This extremist was behind the idea of sending “friendship trains” to Crimea with armed thugs, including the Right Sector and other radicals. This highlights the philosophy and ideology of the people who carried out the coup and came to power. The West swallowed it whole.

Maidan was not yet at the boiling point and had not come to a head. The Ukrainian Security Service and the police did not use weapons, and NATO, speaking through then Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, repeatedly urged President Yanukovych not to use force against the protesters. When the coup was effectively carried out, the Maidan powerbrokers announced a “campaign” against Crimea, branded as terrorists the people of eastern Ukraine who refused to accept the neo-Nazi putsch and sent the armed forces and the nationalist battalions there. At that point, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that the alliance called on the new authorities in Kiev to “use force” proportionally. Do you see the difference? No one really tried to cover this bias up. Dmitry Yarosh who told the Russians to get out of Crimea is, in fact, the spiritual father of Vladimir Zelensky who said exactly the same thing, but this time with regard to all of Ukraine. In September 2021, long before the current developments, taking a question about the people living in eastern Ukraine during an interview, the Ukrainian President said there were people and there were “species” (a slip of the tongue that is typical of Nazis), and that if someone lives in Ukraine and feels like a Russian, they should leave for Russia for the good of their children and grandchildren. This is exactly what Dmitry Yarosh was talking about. The Kiev regime’s neo-Nazi nature was clear from the start and has not changed a bit.

Question: This entire philosophy that they have adopted over the past few years has led to a situation where the second President of Ukraine is fighting Russia. The first one said that he was waging and heroically winning a proxy war against the Russian Federation. The incumbent president is saying that he is winning a real war. Both of them are united by the fact that they assured everyone that our two countries did not have and could not have a common future. They tried hard to erase our common past. What will be the outcome of the efforts to destroy our common past and history?

Sergey Lavrov: When Pyotr Poroshenko realised that a blitzkrieg aiming to forcibly suppress Donbass had failed, he decided to sign the Minsk Agreements and, as we believed at that time, he showed that he had deal-making skills. In reality, that was just a semblance of his negotiability. In July 2022, the former President of Ukraine told Radio Liberty that he had signed the relevant agreements, but that he did not intend to honour them. He noted that he had to temporise in order to obtain more Western weapons. This is undisguised cynicism. For many years after the signing of the Minsk Agreements, Western colleagues ignored their sabotage by Poroshenko and his regime. They used slogans, calling for them to be fulfilled because allegedly there was no alternative to these documents.

We submitted specific proposals to Germany and France, as countries that were involved in the Normandy Format. We also made proposals to the United States, the main patron and overlord of the Kiev authorities. We urged them to pressure Kiev to fulfil purely specific requirements, namely, a special detailed status for certain districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, rather than the whole of Donbass. We expected that they would clarify all aspects of that status, from A to Z. Although the relevant document was ready for signing, Poroshenko did his best to delay this process, and the West pandered to him in this respect. At the final stage of sabotaging the Minsk Agreements, Germany and France started claiming that Russia should fulfil them. However, there was no reply when President Vladimir Putin asked what we should do.

At that time, they were fighting a proxy war, and now a real war is going on. While stating his line, Vladimir Zelensky is saying that Ukraine will win this war and will regain control of all its territories, including Crimea. At the same time, he is forgetting the history of the peninsula. Perhaps he did not know its history when he was starring in the Club of the Merry and Resourceful show. I have no doubt that this line will fail.

We will not tolerate neo-Nazism on the territory of Ukraine. We are fighting neo-Nazis, rather than the people of Ukraine, and we have nothing against the latter. This nation is closely related to us, we are intertwined at the level of human destinies, and this concerns millions of families with a multitude of ties, spiritual, cultural and other bonds. I am convinced that the neo-Nazi government in Kiev will be unable to undermine this genetic code; at the same time, we must also accomplish a lot. It is necessary to offer specific ideas, involve civil society and facilitate contacts between people in Ukraine and Russia. The Russia-Ukraine-Belarus format existed some time ago, and public organisations and experts met within its framework in Minsk and elsewhere. For obvious reasons, this is not happening today, but we need to think about the future.

The people of Ukraine will be liberated from neo-Nazi rulers, and they deserve to live in neighbourliness, friendship and prosperity together with fraternal Slavic nations.

Question: The current regime appears to be in the terminal phase of the disease called Nazism. They are bringing up new Ukrainian “patriots” who are programmed for maximum cruelty which can be seen in their slogans (“a good Russian is a dead Russian” or “hang Moskali from a branch”) all the way to heinous violence that they are broadcasting on all channels. Europe is backing this. Aren’t they concerned that these people who are overflowing with hatred and aggression, and now armed with Western weapons, can take advantage of visa-free travel regulations and go to Europe in this state of mind?

Sergey Lavrov: Europe is playing along with the United States. The EU has almost no independence left. Washington has brought Brussels to heel. There are almost no independent voices left in the EU. Now and then, but increasingly less often, French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to remind everyone of the EU’s “strategic autonomy.” No one will let them create any kind of autonomy, let alone strategic.

European leaders are emboldening the Ukrainian government and encouraging neo-Nazi acts. President of the European Council Charles Michel, Head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg never stop saying that a “battle for European values” is going on in Ukraine, and President Zelensky is “defending freedom and democracy.” In the same way, they backed the neo-Nazi coup of 2014 which sought to abolish everything that is Russian in Ukraine. Later, it was codified in numerous laws outlawing Russian education, media and culture. Today, they are supporting the slogans which Vladimir Zelensky is using to carry out his campaign and presidency.

I operate on the premise that Europe is part of the processes that seek to revive neo-Nazism. It’s hard to draw other conclusions. President Macron recently wondered why Ukraine should live according to a Russia-imposed model. A statement that says it all. In the years that followed the coup, he never asked why the Russians in Ukraine should live according to a model imposed by the neo-Nazis, which is a clear case of double standards. A person who claims to be the number one politician in Europe is saying things like that unashamedly. Amazing.

You got it right in your assessment of the ensuing course of events. There are statistics showing that about 8 million Ukrainian refugees are now in Europe. There are media reports about some of them mistreating citizens of European countries and breaking the law. This is Europe’s choice. If they chose to provide shelter to Ukrainians, the vast majority of whom are people of means who want to continue to live like that going forward - then the people of Europe should feel the consequences of their choice for themselves. We saw similar things in a situation where the Europeans took in the militants from the North Caucasus during a rampage of international terrorism in that region of our country, or refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, including proponents and members of ISIS, who committed bloody crimes in a number of European countries. We do not wish evil to Europe. It must make up its own mind on what it wants to do.

The Arab Spring has created an enormous number of illegal migrants. The Europeans decided to give them legal status and began to place them on their territory and to agree on distribution quotas. The Arab Spring problem was created by military aggression, primarily, against Libya. That country was bombed out and turned into a black hole. It was later used as a conduit for refugees and illegal immigrants fleeing to Europe. Terrorists and weapons smugglers surged in the opposite direction to the Sahara-Sahel region. African countries are still dealing with the aftermath of the reckless Libyan operation, and the EU with the crowds of people of no definite occupation, not all of whom are willing to be law-abiding residents of the European countries.

Europe has created this situation in Ukraine, because it outright refused to convince Pyotr Poroshenko and then Vladimir Zelensky to honour the Minsk agreements. The EU was openly pandering to Kiev’s proclaimed policy for implementing Plan B to capture Donbass by force. This was the reason behind our special military operation. Over the years, we came to realise the futility of our trying to convince the West to consent to an equal and mutually respectful agreement on ensuring security for all without expanding the Alliance.

In this regard, Europe is, to a certain extent, acting as someone who is behind the current state of affairs as well. I hope that after the Arab Spring the EU will see the ongoing Ukrainian “wave” as food for thought, but so far the EU countries have not been thinking much about themselves. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made it clear (many are citing her) that she is aware of German voters’ issues, but it is now “more important” to meet Ukraine's needs for military help. With a philosophy like that, Europe… Well, I wish it good luck.

Question: We live in an interesting era when the media is a dangerous weapon. What is the role of the mass media in the revival, rise and flourishing of Nazism in modern Ukraine, in your opinion?

Sergey Lavrov: The role of the media, including traditional and electronic media, as well as social networks, is constantly growing but it is not they who “rule the roost,” but politicians. In recent years, we have already seen that the West, especially the United States, Germany, France and other European countries are good at “bossing around” journalists, the media, and ensuring loyalty to the policy that this or that government wants to pursue.

This is especially noticeable in the case of the Biden Administration, when almost all electronic media, television, and print publications are aimed at mobilising public opinion in support of what the United States is doing in Ukraine. However, this does not always work out. Now US newspapers are openly criticising the indifference with which the Administration treated the natural disaster in Florida against the background of tens of billions of US dollars allocated to Ukraine. This shows that the authorities cannot always control the media and public opinion. In Germany, there is virtually no dissent in the media. All mass media are “mobilised” to justify what the Germans are doing in Ukraine. In France, the situation is similar.

Europe, through various international agencies, primarily those created under the European Union, has been using outright censorship for more than a year (it started about eight years ago), preventing alternative points of view from reaching the public consciousness on the continent. A “good” example: when RT and Sputnik opened representative offices in Paris and tried to get accreditation at the Elysee Palace, they were refused. President of France Macron explained to journalists that “this is not the media but Moscow’s propaganda tool.” In addition, various platforms and associations were established in the West to protect freedom in cyberspace and the independence of the media, within which alternative sources of information were stifled under the pretext of finely worded slogans.

During the events leading up to the Soviet Union’s disappearance, we were so complaisant in all international arenas, as if an era of universal, eternal wellbeing had dawned. In 1990, at the initiative of France and other Western states, the OSCE adopted a document obliging all the member states without exception to provide full access for their citizens to any sources of information, both domestically and abroad. Therefore, the refusal to issue accreditation to RT and Sputnik at the Elysee Palace is a gross violation of the obligations assumed 30 years ago at the initiative of France.