The United States and its allies have declared a “total war” on the entire common civilizational and cultural space known as the Russian World, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
“The West has a declared a total war on us, on the entire Russian World. No one hides this today, and it has reached the point of absurdity – to a ‘cancel culture’ of Russia and everything connected with our country,” Lavrov said, speaking at a meeting with officials from Russia’s regions on Friday.
“Classics have fallen under the ban: Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin. Figures of national culture and art, who represent our culture today, are being persecuted,” he added.
Lavrov predicted that this unprecedented level of hatred of everything Russian “will be with us for a long time,” with authorities in a number of Western countries actively encouraging casual Russophobia.
At the same time, Lavrov said, “the United States and its satellites are doubling, tripling, quadrupling their efforts to ‘contain’ our country, using the widest possible range of tools, from unilateral economic sanctions to blatantly false propaganda in the global media space.”
“We must be prepared to accept the fact that this situation has revealed the true attitude of the West to those beautiful slogans put forward 30 years ago after the end of the Cold War about ‘universal human values’…We see now what the worth of these phrases is,” Lavrov said.
Western countries have long sought to spark quarrels between the peoples of the former USSR “using tendentious interpretations of historical facts,” Lavrov said, pointing, for example, to the effort by the German government to rewrite the history of the Second World War.
“Recently, the German government approved the concept of the so-called ‘Documentation Center on World War II and the German Occupation of Europe.’ This concept, on first reading, raises serious questions on its agreement with the historical facts,” the minister stressed. “The structure of the proposed center is planned in such a way as to not only belittle in every possible manner the contribution of the Soviet Union and all the peoples of the USSR to the defeat of German fascism, but even to obscure the crimes of the Third Reich against the Soviet people. In the planned expositions, these themes are simply not indicated,” he said. At the same time, efforts are made to compare the Nazi criminals to the Soviet liberators of Europe, Lavrov said.
Russia will not remain complacent in the global situation that has developed, the foreign minister stressed, with discussions underway about enhancing cooperation between the foreign ministry and civil society to expand the Russian voice abroad.
More needs to be done at the international level, Lavrov said, with the Russian non-profits woefully underrepresented at various international platforms, particularly those working in Russia’s regions.
“There is the successful experience of the regular inclusion of Russian delegations at sessions of the United Nations General Assembly in some regional non-government structures…This experience shows that such partnership is very promising, and we would like to broaden it and give it a systemic character,” the foreign minister said.
Russia kicked off a military operation in Ukraine in February following a formal request for assistance from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which suffered weeks of escalating shelling, sabotage and sniper attacks by Kiev forces, and feared an imminent full-scale Ukrainian assault following the breakdown of the Minsk peace negotiations.
Moscow’s decision sparked an unprecedented wave of condemnation by Western countries, who slapped Russia with over 7,800 new sanctions, seized over $300 billion in Russian state assets abroad, ramped up anti-Russian propaganda and dramatically escalated NATO’s military activity near Russia’s borders.
The US and its allies have so far failed to achieve the goals of crashing the Russian economy or overthrow the government, with sanctions, and particularly efforts by European countries to slash dependence on Russian energy supplies, backfiring and leading to a dramatic rise in inflation, food and fuel costs.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that Europe’s decision to commit “economic suicide” by rejecting Russian energy was its own internal affair, and that Russia would “proceed pragmatically and primarily from [its] own economic interests” in the situation that has developed.