Ukraine’s hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield is senseless, warns Lavrov

Ukraine’s hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield is senseless given that Moscow holds nuclear weapons and any effort by the NATO alliance to keep aiding Kyiv will prove to be a “suicidal escapade”, Russia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs told the UN General Assembly on Saturday.

Sergey Lavrov said criticism of Russia’s “special operation” based on the UN Charter and Ukraine’s territorial integrity, ignored the fact that the UN’s founding document also “declares the obligation to respect the principles of the equality and self-determination of peoples”, he said, arguing that this had after all been the basis for ongoing decolonisation efforts.

“The rights of Russians and those that feel they are part of Russian culture following the coup d’etat in Kyiv have methodically been exterminated,” he declared, and this poses a threat to Russian and wider European security.

Lavrov said President Vladimir Putin had a “realistic settlement plan” and was prepared to negotiate, blaming the West for sabotaging previous attempts.

He said the attempt by the Washington-London-Brussels axis to defeat Russia was nullifying the UN’s attempts to enhance global cooperation through agreements such as Sunday’s Pact for the Future – which Russia refused to back – and was “blocking the functioning of the entire system of global governance, including the Security Council.”

“That’s not something we chose and we’re not responsible for the consequences of this dangerous course,” he added.

He accused the West of “steadily destroying the model of globalisation that they themselves created”, warning that other regions of the world were forging their own alliances, inviting all of Europe and Asia to join a “single Eurasian space” separate from Washington’s influence.

Addressing the Middle East crisis, Lavrov said there was no justification for the terror attacks by Hamas and others of 7 October but the “mass collective punishment” of Palestinians since then had created an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”

He bemoaned the rise of “the now almost commonplace practice of political killings” and noted the reported killing of a Hezbollah leader on Friday in Beirut.

“Security can be either equal and indivisible for all, or it won’t be for anyone”, he told delegates, returning to the theme of NATO’s “exceptionalism and impunity”.

The Russian Foreign Minister said the UN itself needed to be more even-handed in investigating “terrorist methods” used by Israel, the US and others, such as during the wireless device attacks in Lebanon last week.

Moreover, the UN needed to “avoid the temptation to play into the hands of individual States, particularly those that are actively calling not for cooperation but to divide the world into the flowering garden and the jungle – or to those sitting around the table of democracy, and those that are on the menu.”