Speech at OSCE meeting
Schallenberg and colleagues appalled by Lavrov
At the OSCE Ministerial Council, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov launched sharp attacks against the West and the "Nazi regime in Kiev". Several foreign ministers condemned Lavrov's tirade, while US chief diplomat Antony Blinken spoke of a "disinformation tsunami".
In his speech, Lavrov lamented a new Cold War that could turn into a "hot one" and drew a damning assessment of the OSCE, which in his view no longer plays a "meaningful role in any area". At the same time, he listed what the organization should be concerned with: The "racism" of the Ukrainian government, the investigation into the explosions on the Nord Stream pipeline or the events in the Kiev suburb of Butsha, where in April 2022 "corpses were carefully laid out and served to journalists on a platter".
Baerbock: "You can fool yourself"
This blatant denial of the Russian massacre of the civilian population there caused outrage among others among Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg. He sharply rejected Lavrov's statements "about the barbaric acts of Russian troops in Butsha and other places in Ukraine". His German colleague Annalena Baerbock spoke of Lavrov's "intolerable lies". "You can fool yourself, but you can't fool us, the 1.3 billion people (in the OSCE area)," she said, according to the dpa news agency.
Lavrov also accused the Western states of "selectively" applying the human rights and international law principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe signed in Helsinki during the Cold War in order to expand their hegemony in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister left the room during speech
US Secretary of State Blinken sharply rejected the statements made by his Russian counterpart. The "disinformation tsunami" should not be allowed to deceive us into thinking that Russia is not concerned with its own security, but is pursuing an imperial project "to wipe Ukraine off the map".
He said that ruler Vladimir Putin had already said in 2014 that the Ukrainian people were "part of the Russian people". In 2021, he branded Ukraine an "artificial state" that would one day be united with Mother Russia. The USA would defend the principles of Helsinki and also the Ukrainians' free choice regarding their future. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha was the first speaker in the plenary session before Blinken took the floor. Without mentioning him by name, he described Lavrov as a "war criminal". When his Russian counterpart then spoke, Sybiha left the room.
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