West declared Russia ‘hybrid, total war’: Russia

Moscow (Times Of Ocean)- The West is engaged in a “total, hybrid war” against Russia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. UN

West tries to ‘destroy, break, exterminate, and strangle Russian economy and Russia as whole’, according to top Russian diplomat.

Lavrov told a meeting of the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund in Moscow: “Today has been declared a real hybrid war, a total war.

The term (total war) was used by Hitler’s Germany and is now used by many European politicians to describe what they want to do with the Russian Federation.

“The goals are not hidden, they declared publicly — to destroy, break, exterminate, strangle the Russian economy and Russia as a whole,” he noted.

In his comments, Lavrov also said that the Western politicians, by bullying Russia, are betraying and forgetting the values that they had been proclaiming for years, including free speech, free markets, inviolability of private property, and presumption of innocence.

“As soon as the West had to do something against Russia, they easily betrayed those values,” he said.

To get the desired results at the UN vote, the West does not scorn blackmailing countries all over the world.

Lavrov doubts that Russia will be isolated despite all the efforts and pressure, and says the country will not isolate itself.

“The majority of the countries in the world are interested in an equal interstate cooperation based on the key principles of the UN Charter,” he said.

Regarding Russia’s motives in Ukraine, Lavrov stated the main objective is to protect the population of the rebel republics from “a military threat from Kiev.”

By implementing the Minsk Agreement, Kyiv would not have started its “special military operation.”

In the event of a military confrontation on the Russian border, he argued, Russia had no choice but to defend itself.

“All those years that the Ukrainian authorities were evading from implementing the Minsk Agreement, the nationalists were destroying objects of the civilian infrastructure — hospitals, schools, all this is known, these facts were demonstrated by our media but was hushed in the West, including the killing of civilians,” he said.

Russia reiterated its concerns over US-sponsored military biological laboratories in Ukraine, and Lavrov promised that the issue would remain on the UN Security Council’s agenda.

His message to the members of the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund was to consider geopolitical developments, and to emphasize the development of cooperation with countries that did not join “the anti-Russian hysteria.”

Russian-Ukrainian hostilities have drawn international outrage, as the EU, US, UK, among others, have imposed harsh financial sanctions on Moscow.

UN estimates that 1,035 civilians have been killed in Ukraine and 1,650 injured, although they warn that the real number is likely much higher.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), more than 3.7 million Ukrainians have also fled to neighboring countries, with millions more displaced within Ukraine.