in India, Sergei Lavrov provokes laughter by claiming that the conflict was started “by using Ukrainians”

Traveling to India, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sparked hilarity on Friday March 3 by making remarks denying his country’s responsibility for the origin of the war in Ukraine. “You know, the war that we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainians…”, said the head of Russian diplomacy at the “Dialogue of Raisina” forum in New Delhi, on the sidelines of the G20. These few words caused many laughs in the room, briefly interrupting his speech, as captured by the Indian press agency Asian News International (ANI).

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict “of course influenced Russian policy, which includes energy policy. (…) We would no longer depend on a Western partner, we would no longer allow them to blow up gas pipelines”, Sergei Lavrov continued, referring to the explosions which damaged the northern European gas pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2, last September, and for which Russians and Westerners reject responsibility. During his speech at the forum on Friday, the head of diplomacy again mentioned what he considers to be a desire of Western countries to subject Russia “a strategic defeat”.

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Since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in February 2022, Vladimir Putin and the main Russian power officials have argued that Ukraine and more broadly Western countries have provoked the current confrontation. “They are the ones who are guilty of the war, we use force to stop it”thus reaffirmed the master of the Kremlin, during his address to the nation, on February 21.

“The possibility of the continuation of the Ukrainian conflict, its escalation and the number of victims rests entirely with the Western elites and of course with the current regime in kyiv”he also defended a year after the start of the war, while Kiev and Western capitals insist that Moscow is directly responsible for the conflict because of the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian forces.