Maria Zakharova's Censored Interview with Spanish Media

Russia's MFA announced the interview sought by the venerable Spanish publication "A-Be-Se" was refused publication in print citing its length then also denying it publication electronically despite length not being a factor in that milieu. The result is MFA's decision to publish the interview on its website. As you read the machine translated text, you'll see Maria is her usual sharp self and her replies are certainly diplomatic but pointed as we've become accustomed. All emphasis is mine.

Question: Could you explain at what stage the peace talks with Ukraine are?

Maria Zakharova: Russian-Ukrainian talks are continuing. After three head-to-head rounds in Belarus and one in Turkey, they are held in video format. They discuss the settlement of the situation in Ukraine, the establishment of its neutral, nuclear-free and non-aligned status, demilitarization and denazification, as well as security guarantees. Unfortunately, the position of the Ukrainian delegation is very volatile, and the negotiation process is accompanied by aggressive rhetoric of Kiev and the West, the supply of Western weapons, which does not contribute to reaching agreements.

Question: In your opinion, are international mechanisms applicable to resolve the conflict in Donbass?

Maria Zakharova: Over the past eight years, Russia has made every effort to resolve the conflict in Donbass by peaceful means. With our mediation, the "Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements of February 12, 2015" was signed, which was approved by UN Security Council Resolution 2202. It provided for a clear sequence of steps leading to the reintegration of Donbass into Ukraine on the terms of the special status of the region.

However, the Ukrainian leadership categorically refused to do this. Our attempts to force the Kiev regime to implement the "Package of Measures" were unsuccessful. The armed formations of Ukraine did not stop shelling donbass. An inhumane socio-economic and transport blockade was imposed against its inhabitants, putting the region on the brink of survival. Such a destructive line of Kiev was actively supported by the United States and its NATO allies, who carried out the military development of the territory of Ukraine, encouraged the promotion of aggressive Russophobia, ignored neo-Nazi manifestations, turning the country into a springboard against Russia. As it turned out later, in March the Armed Forces of Ukraine were preparing the seizure of Donbass by force.

As a result, we were left with no choice but to recognize the independence of the DPR and LHP on February 21 of this year, and on February 24 of this year to launch a special military operation to protect people living in Donbass, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. All its goals and objectives will certainly be fulfilled.

Question: Do you think that the territorial requirements imposed on Ukraine, specifically on Donbass, complicate the agreements?

Maria Zakharova: These are already established territorial realities that Kiev and other countries need to recognize. They arose because of the policy of the Kiev authorities themselves, who came to power through a neo-Nazi coup d'état in 2014. It is necessary to respect the legitimate and informed choice of peoples and the right of nations to self-determination, enshrined in the UN Charter.

Question: Why was Russia able to use force in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine, and Kiev cannot do the same with regard to Donetsk and Lugansk?

Maria Zakharova: The Georgian authorities attacked South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers. It is interesting that they remembered the situation in Chechnya. These are completely different situations. Chechen militants used terrorist methods, committed terrorist attacks in Chechnya itself and other subjects of the Russian Federation. And they were considered democratic forces and supported in the US and the EU. Do you remember what the reaction of the international community was then? Everyone supported the separatists – although they were not separatists, but international terrorists. The first in Europe, by the way. The United States, Britain, and European countries then called them freedom fighters. Now I have a question: why didn't the West call the residents of Donbass "freedom fighters"? After all, they are not terrorists. And it was difficult to call them separatists, since in the Minsk agreements, which were signed by the DPR and LPR, Donbass was called part of Ukraine. And in general, the entire Minsk package of measures is about how the DPR and LPR will live as part of Ukraine. So why didn't the West support them?

But the residents of Donbass were killed for eight years. Civilians and children were killed. On the territory of Europe, at the behest of Kiev, children's cemeteries appeared. Where was the government of Spain, for example? Now in the EU everyone is talking about refugees from Ukraine. Did you know that 1.2 million refugees from Ukraine came to Russia in 2014–2015? And the West was silent again. No sanction has been imposed on the Kiev regime to induce it to stop killing people for eight years.

The Kiev regime came to power in an unconstitutional way and for eight years used military force against its own people – the civilians of Donbass. He shelled the territory of the DPR and LPR, using heavy artillery. Thousands of civilians, including women and children, were killed. Residential buildings, water, electricity and gas supply facilities, hospitals and schools were under attack. Kiev has imposed an economic and transport blockade of Donbass, putting its residents on the brink of survival.

We regularly drew the attention of Western countries to the genocide of the population of the south-eastern regions of Ukraine, which continued all these years, which refused to accept and support the results of the anti-constitutional coup d'état of 2014, opposed the massive violation of the rights of the Russian-speaking population in the country, the policy of forced Ukrainization, the destruction of Russian culture and the rewriting of history. But they didn't want to hear us.

There was a chance to resolve the internal Ukrainian conflict peacefully. This is a consistent implementation of the above-mentioned "Package of Measures". However, Kiev refused to follow this path, and Western countries did nothing to prevent this.

Ukraine's sabotage of the Minsk agreements, the undisguised desire of its leadership to resolve the conflict in the Donbass by force, including using weapons, equipment and other means provided by NATO countries, forced us to take those steps.

Russian actions in Chechnya, South Ossetia and now in Ukraine are absolutely legal, while the actions of the Kiev authorities, who staged the genocide of Donbass and the destruction of everything Russian in their own country, are illegitimate, unconstitutional and immoral.

Question: Why was Russia able to sign military cooperation agreements with South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Donetsk, Lugansk, but no one can do this with Ukraine?

Answer: What does it mean that "no one can do it"? This is the problem of the Western community – it does not understand what is happening at all. Until 2014, we signed a number of agreements with Ukraine covering a wide range of bilateral relations, including military-technical cooperation. However, after the coup d'état in Kiev in February 2014, the nationalist forces that came to power, with the approval of the West, unilaterally dissolved them.

The United States and NATO countries needed Ukraine, as detached as possible from Russia. The concerns we have expressed about this have simply been ignored. We have repeatedly stressed that all countries must respect the principle of indivisibility of security and not strengthen their security at the expense of others. Russia put forward specific proposals on legal security guarantees, which concerned, among other things, the non-expansion of the Alliance to the East, the return of its military infrastructure to the configuration of 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed. However, the West ignored them.

By recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 after Georgia's aggression against Tskhinval and in light of Saakashvili's similar plans for Sukhum, Russia assumed responsibility for the security of the two young republics of Transcaucasia. This task does not lose its relevance today. A number of bilateral agreements on cooperation in the military field have been signed with these countries aimed at forming common defense and security spaces with each of them, as provided for by the treaties with Abkhazia on alliance and strategic partnership of November 24, 2014 and with South Ossetia on alliance and integration of March 18, 2015.

Thus, the signing and implementation of the above-mentioned agreements with Sukhum and Tskhinval is dictated by the mutual interest of the parties and is an important factor of peace and stability in this part of Transcaucasia.

Question: How will the issue of an international investigation into what happened in Bucha be resolved, given that there are contrary allegations: was there a provocation or were there war crimes?

Answer: The statements you cited are not the opposite. The war crime is the Ukrainian provocation itself, which must be investigated. On April 3, in Bucha, the Kiev regime staged a cynical dramatization, accusing Russian servicemen of killing civilians. At the same time, our troops left the city on March 30, and for all the time they were there, not a single local resident was injured by violent actions. As after their departure, within four days, until the arrival of the Security Service of Ukraine in Bucha, there was not a single report of mass executions of people.

What the Ukrainians and their Western handlers are trying to present as "the atrocities of the Russian military in Bucha" is, of course, staged. We can say this with certainty for a number of reasons. You have probably seen the analysis of these dramatizations, which were cited by the Russian Defense Ministry, which quite clearly shows the low quality of Western propaganda fakes.

What is important is that the West did not come up with anything new this time. These provocations are a mechanism they have already tested, they have already used it, there is evidence that the Nazis used exactly the same false propaganda algorithms against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. I will name just two examples.

In October 1944, Soviet troops temporarily occupied and then left the city of Nemmersdorf. Immediately after the transfer of the city again under the control of the Third Reich, German specialists in the field of propaganda "poured" there, including the head of the propaganda department of the NSDAP for East Prussia, K. Gebhardt. They worked for two days, after which the main Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an article titled "The Fury of soviet Beasts." This article described the "horrors" and "mutilations" allegedly inflicted on the civilian population of Nemmersdorf by Soviet troops. Personally, the head of the press service of the NSDAP, Otto Dietrich, gave an instruction on October 26, 1944, "to put up a close-up of the nightmarish Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia and comment on them in the most acute way."

The Reich even organized an "international commission", where he invited representatives of "pocket governments", in particular, Estonia. Just a week later, H. Mäe's "commission" published a report in which it blamed Moscow for everything. H. Mäe's report at the end of 1944 became one of the most cited documents of Goebbels propaganda. Copies of it were sent in foreign languages to all the world's agencies.

Naturally, after the war, this history began to be dealt with. The German war historian B. Fisch, who himself participated in the battles for Nemmersdorf, admitted that after the discovery of the bodies by the German side, not a single attempt was made to identify them. The published pictures showed specially collected bodies of victims from several villages in East Prussia. And already in the XXI century, the German Foreign Ministry admitted that Nemmersdorf's falsifications were specially compiled by Lieutenant Pfeiffer of the secret field police of the Wehrmacht, after which they spread through Berlin.

But even the well-known provocation in Nemmersdorf was not the first. Back in 1941, the Ukrainian-language, I draw your attention, newspaper "Krakowskie Vesti", censored and controlled directly by the Third Reich, published an article about "people tortured by "murderers from the NKVD" who were lying on the streets of Lviv" in the abandoned city after the retreat of the Red Army. At the same time, emphasis is placed on the nationality of those killed. Kraków News wrote that "the Bolsheviks shot 1500 ethnic Ukrainians with machine gun fire in Lutsk." Paradoxically, the Nazi Reich accused the international Soviet Union of genocide!

Krakow News was well aware of its role in this story – in the context of Ukraine, they were the propaganda guide of fascist Germany for the whole world. The employees of Krakow News spoke directly about this in the press: their task is to use the victims to ensure that "the word "Ukraine" again appears on the front pages of major periodicals," and from "the blood of Ukrainians to make moral capital for the people."

Exactly the same as it is now. Fascist provocations are again used in order to "bring Ukraine to the front pages of newspapers", and people's lives are only a bargaining chip in this propaganda game of fascists.

By the way, you know what's most interesting. The "Krakow News" was edited by a certain Mykhailo Khomiak, a Ukrainian collaborator, a supporter of Hitler. So, he is the grandfather in a direct line of the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Heiko Freeland, one of the key figures among Russophobic circles on the American continent. It is Heiko Freeland who most often calls for isolating our country, referring, among other things, to Bucha. He simply repeats after his grandfather what eighty years ago he and his fascist associates failed.

Question: Don't you think that the current special operation in Ukraine will bring NATO even closer to Russia's borders, especially if Sweden and Finland join it?

Answer: The statement of the question is incorrect. Russia's special operation in Ukraine should be perceived as a consequence of NATO's aggressive expansionist policy under the leadership of the United States, and not vice versa. Step by step, the North Atlantic bloc pursued a policy of drawing new countries into its orbit, moving ever closer to the Russian borders and ignoring our repeated warnings about the danger of such an approach for the entire system of European security.

As for Finland and Sweden, their active "processing" has been carried out by the alliance for a long time. In order to radically influence the policies of these Scandinavian states, NATO diligently molded Russia into an image of an enemy. Although in fact, it was the alliance that created a threat to the security of our country. We warn our neighbors from Northern Europe that their involvement in NATO's orbit threatens to unbalance the European security system regularly and for quite some time. This is not a "topic of recent weeks". [Furthermore, those nations would be violating the several OSCE security treaties they signed if they join NATO, something that is too often omitted.]

Back in 2015, I warned: "Sweden's accession to NATO would have military-political and foreign policy consequences that would require the necessary reciprocal steps on the Russian side." In 2016, the Russian Foreign Ministry reported that the accession of the Scandinavians to NATO would disrupt stability and change the balance of power in the region, forcing us to take additional measures to ensure our security. In 2018, we talked about the risks associated with the participation of Sweden and Finland in the NATO exercise "Trident Juncture". I also touched upon this topic, for example, at a briefing on December 24, 2021, and the relevant material was published and most recently – in the light of the latest statements by official Stockholm and Helsinki – on April 15 of this year.

We have always kept NATO on the agenda of our contacts with our Finnish and Swedish partners. Thus, Deputy Foreign Minister A.V. Grushko discussed it with ambassador of the Republic of Finland to the Russian Federation A. Helanteryu in November 2020, etc. We have been following the way the Americans and NATO Brussels are progressively pulling the Scandinavians to the activities of the alliance for a very long time.

I ask you to understand that geopolitical confrontation with Russia is the essence of NATO's existence. All the talk about the defensive nature of this organization is a fiction. NATO's efforts are aimed at a radical change in the military-political situation in Europe, undermining the strategic balance of forces and deterring our country. If Finland and Sweden join the alliance, they will turn into a space of confrontation between the North Atlantic bloc and Russia with all the ensuing consequences, including for our time-tested good-neighborly relations. Is this what the people of Sweden and Finland are striving for?

Question: Aren't the negative consequences for Russia, including sanctions and battlefield casualties, from the continuation of hostilities in Ukraine much greater than the benefits?

Maria Zakharova: We have repeatedly said that the start of the special operation was a forced measure. We were left with no other choice. It is carried out in order to stop the genocide of the inhabitants of the Donbass republics, who have been living for eight years in the conditions of endless Ukrainian shelling, deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of water, gas and electricity supply, banking, trade, economic blockade. An equally important task of the special operation is to protect Russia itself from the threats that came from Ukrainian territory as a result of its military development by NATO countries and artificially escalated Russophobia and hatred of everything related to Russia.

Question: How do you see the future of Russian-Spanish relations in the current situation?

Maria Zakharova: Of course, there is nothing good in the fact that many positive bilateral developments were crossed out by the decision of the Spanish authorities to join the anti-Russian sanctions. At the same time, Madrid did not dwell solely on the economic component of the restrictions - two deliveries of weapons, including lethal ones, have already been made to Kiev. Our diplomatic ties were dealt a blow as a result of the Spaniards joining the campaign for the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats. Due to the short-sighted actions of the partners, a number of projects in the energy and transport sectors were "suspended", and the localization of the production of Spanish textile products at Russian light industry enterprises is also in question. The position of the Spanish side on the further development of cultural and humanitarian ties does not add positivity: it was decided to "freeze" cooperation in the field of science and education, including work on documents of the legal framework ready for signing.

We see that Spain, like many other countries, has actively joined the process of destroying everything that has been created in recent decades. It remains to be hoped that the traditionally positive perception of the Russian world by the Spanish people will be much stronger than the current militant trend towards the destruction of the basis of bilateral relations, actively supported by official Madrid.