Sergey Lavrov's Interview for the Film Nazism Under Investigation

What Lavrov says in the following interview must be recalled when reading this excellent essay from last August, “World Order Z: The Irreversibility of Change and Prospects for Survival,” which IMO is seminal and explains a great deal—especially why Russia must continue to liberate all Ukraine. After reading that, I highly suggest reading this by Crooke, “Defiance at the G20: 'World Order Z' and the birth of a Wider Political ‘Movement,'” which is where I was led to the first essay as Crooke's title suggests.

What follows is the machine translation from Russian of Lavrov's interview. I hope the film gets English voice-over or subtitles as many will want to see it. How much of Lavrov's interview will be used in the film is unknown. I've written about the Fascist nature of the Outlaw US Empire twice and likely will again. What ought to worry people is the EU's allegience to the Empire's Fascism and direction it's taking, which Lavrov does note.

Question: Today we are told (primarily by Ukrainians) that the Russians "invented everything", there are no Nazis in Ukraine and never have been. However, we remember history. We see that over the years of their independence, they have nurtured a huge number of Nazi organizations and supported them at the state level. The same Azov, which was sponsored by oligarchs, developed under the protectorate of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Why did this become possible in a country called European? How did that happen? Is there an influence of external forces in this?

Sergey Lavrov: Absolutely. Without the influence of external forces, nothing would have happened. Neither the glorification of the Nazis, nor the transformation of Nazism into the theory and practice of the current Ukrainian authorities. The "case" stretches back to the creation of the Soviet Union. President of Russia Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken about how Ukraine was formed within the borders in which it found itself during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Then one of the ideologists of the American approach to international affairs and the dominance of the United States, Z. Brzezinski, said that Russia is a superpower with Ukraine, and without Ukraine it is a regional player. This was Washington's line of implementation. In many ways, it was this attitude that prevented us from prevailing after December 1991, which was that "life has ordered it this way." We wanted to see Ukraine as a good neighbor and a reliable friend. "Family ties" were close, so many destinies were intertwined. It was all our sincere wish. I say this confidently, because already at that time I was dealing with issues that arose in the post-Soviet space.

The American line was aimed precisely at achieving the opposite result, so that Ukraine would become "anti-Russia". Ukrainian leaders of that time succumbed to appropriate actions and enveloping approaches of the United States. President Leonid Kuchma, when no one could imagine that Ukraine would turn into "anti-Russia", wrote the book "Ukraine is not Russia". Probably, everyone is striving for some romantic goal, to join some culture, but even then the subtext of this "slogan" was that there is Europe, and there is Russia.

All the talks held in the OSCE in the late 1990s about the need to build a common economic and humanitarian space, as well as a security space on the entire Eurasian continent (from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean), turned out to be empty words. Behind the screen of these beautiful words, the West promoted the concept: either with us or with Russia. Back in 2003, when the next presidential election campaign began in Ukraine, EU figures and officials, including Belgian Foreign Minister L. Michel, publicly stated that the Ukrainian people should decide who they wanted to be with: Europe or Russia. This "either-or" and "whoever is not with us is a moskal" is a philosophy deeply entrenched in European and Western minds, which in many ways, if not to a decisive extent, has played a role in what we have today. There, the neo-Nazi ideology is being implemented in every possible way.

You mentioned volunteer and nationalist battalions, regiments like Azov. When the coup d'état took place in 2014, Azov was already known as an extremist organization. In 2015, the House of Representatives of the US Congress, deciding on the allocation of assistance to Ukraine, including military assistance, excluded this formation from the list of recipients with a special clause. Azov was included in the list of terrorist organizations in a number of European countries, as well as inJapan. Now the Japanese have outdid everyone. After the start of a special military operation, they officially apologized to the Azov people for being included in the terrorist lists and assured that "this will not happen again."

What slogans did the putschists come with in February 2014? The first demand was to deprive the Russian language of the regional status, which was provided for by Ukrainian legislation. The hastily assembled Verkhovna Rada then did not make decisions on the abolition of this law, but the instincts of the persons who seized power illegally became immediately clear. D.A. Yarosh, one of the leaders of the coup d'état, the head of the Right Sector (which is banned in our country, like the Azov regiment) said that the Russian will never think like Ukrainians, will not speak Ukrainian and will not honor Ukrainian heroes, so Russians should be expelled from Crimea. It was this extremist who was one of the initiators of sending "friendship trains" to the peninsula, stuffed with thugs with weapons, including the Right Sector and other radicals. This is an illustrative example of the philosophy and ideology with which the people who committed the coup d'état came to power. The West "swallowed" all this.

"Maidan" has not yet completely "boiled" and has not "broken through". The Security Service of Ukraine and the police did not use weapons there, and NATO members, through their then General Secretary of the bloc, A. Fogh Rasmussen, repeatedly called on President Viktor Yanukovych not to use force against protesters. When the coup d'état was carried out, the Maidan authorities announced a "march" to Crimea, called the residents of eastern Ukraine, who did not accept the neo-Nazi putsch, terrorists and sent armed forces and the same nationalist battalions there. Then the same A. Fogh Rasmussen said that the alliance calls on the new authorities in Kiev to "use force" proportionally. Feel the difference. Such bias was not particularly masked by anyone. Dmitry Yarosh, who demanded that the Russians get out of Crimea, is, in fact, the "spiritual father" of V.A. Zelensky, who said exactly the same thing, but only in relation to the whole of Ukraine. In September 2021, long before the current events, the Ukrainian President in an interview, answering a question about his attitude to people living in the east of the country, said that there are people, and there are "individuals" (a reservation characteristic of the Nazis), and that if you live in Ukraine and feel like a Russian, then for the sake of the fate of your children and grandchildren, you should go to Russia. This is exactly what D.A. Yarosh proposed. The neo-Nazi nature of the Kiev regime was immediately obvious and did not change in any way.

Question: All this philosophy, which they have been imbued with in recent years, has led to the fact that the second president of Ukraine is at war with us. Only the first said that he was waging a hybrid war with the Russian Federation, in which he heroically won. The current one says that he is winning a real war. What they have in common is that both assured us that we do not and cannot have a common future, and both did everything to erase the common past. What are the consequences of working to destroy a common past and a common history?

Sergey Lavrov: First, Petr Poroshenko, realizing that the blitzkrieg with the forceful suppression of Donbass had failed, went to the signing of the Minsk Agreements and showed, as it seemed to us then, negotiability. It was really just her appearance. In July of this year, the former President of Ukraine in an interview with Radio Liberty admitted that he had signed the agreements, but did not intend to fulfill them. He noted that he needed to buy time in order to get more weapons from the West. This is blatant cynicism. For many years after the signing of the Minsk Agreements, our Western colleagues ignored the sabotage of these documents by Poroshenko and his regime, calling for their implementation in the form of slogans, since there was no alternative to the agreements.

We addressed specific proposals to the Germans, the French, as participants in the Normandy format, to the Americans as the main patron and overlord of the Kiev authorities, urging them to put pressure on Kiev to fulfill purely substantive requirements: the special status of Donbass, not even the entire region, but certain areas of the DPR and LPR was spelled out from "A to Z". The relevant document was ready for adoption, but Poroshenko did everything to postpone this process in every possible way, and the West indulged him in this. At the final stage of sabotaging the Minsk agreements, the Germans and the French began to argue that it was Russia that should fulfill them. When President Vladimir Putin asked what we should do, there was no answer.

Voicing the line that was pursued then "hybridly" and now on the battlefield, Zelensky declares that they "will win this war and take all their lands," including Crimea. At the same time, he forgets the history of the peninsula. Maybe he didn't know her at all when he was "engaged" in the "Club of the Merry and Resourceful." I have no doubt that such a line will fail.

We will not tolerate neo-Nazism on the territory of Ukraine. We are at war with neo-Nazis, not with Ukrainians, against whom we have nothing against. This is a people close and dear to us, with whom we are intertwined at the level of human destinies, millions of families with a huge number of connections, spiritual and cultural and other ties. I am convinced that the Kiev neo-Nazi authorities will not be able to undermine this genetic code, but we ourselves must do a lot. It is necessary to offer specific ideas on how to "raise" civil society, to ensure contacts between people in Ukraine and Russia. Some time ago, there was a Russia-Ukraine-Belarus format, within the framework of which public organizations and experts met (including in Minsk). For obvious reasons, this is not happening now, but we need to think ahead of time.

The Ukrainian people will be liberated from neo-Nazi rulers. He deserves to live in good neighborliness, friendship, prosperity next to his Slavic brothers.

Question: The feeling that the regime in power has the disease of "Nazism" already in its terminal stage. They are cultivating new Ukrainian "patriots." These people are programmed for maximum cruelty: starting from slogans ("a good Russian is a dead Russian", "Moskalyaka na Gilyaka"), continuing with monstrous massacres that they spread through all channels. Europe now supports this. Is it not frightening to her that all people charged with hatred, aggression, and now also Western weapons, using the same visa-free regime, can find themselves with this attitude on the territory of Europe?

Sergey Lavrov: Europe is playing together with the United States. The EU has almost no independence left – Washington has crushed Brussels under itself. There are almost no independent voices left in the European Union. French President Emmanuel Macron occasionally, but less and less, tries to remind about the "strategic autonomy" of the EU. No one will allow them to create any kind of autonomy, let alone a strategic one.

European leaders also "egg on" the Ukrainian authorities and encourage neo-Nazi manifestations. President of the European Council Charles Michel, Head of the European Commission W. von der Leyen, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg constantly say that in Ukraine there is a "struggle for European values", and President V.A. Zelensky "defends freedom and democracy". In the same way, they supported the neo-Nazi coup d'état of 2014, aimed at abolishing everything Russian on Ukrainian territory. Subsequently, this was enshrined in numerous laws prohibiting Russian education, the media, and culture. Today, they support the slogans under which V.A. Zelensky carries out his campaign and rule.

I proceed from the fact that Europe is part of the processes of revival of neo-Nazism. It is difficult to draw other conclusions. French President Emmanuel Macron recently asked why Ukraine should live according to the model that Russia "imposes"? A telling statement. In the years that followed the coup, he did not ask why Russians in Ukraine should live by the model imposed by neo-Nazis – an obvious double standard. Without shame, this is uttered by the mouth of a man who at this stage claims to be the first politician in Europe. Strikingly!

You are right in your assessments of the further course of events. There are statistics: about eight million Ukrainian refugees were in Europe. There were news and reports about how some of them behave: insult citizens of European countries, commit offenses. It is the choice of the Europeans. If they decide to shelter Ukrainians – overwhelmingly people who have lived well and want to continue this – then the consequences of such a choice should be felt by the inhabitants of Europe for themselves. A similar thing was observed in the situation when the Europeans decided to accept militants of the North Caucasus during the rampant international terrorism in this part of our country, or refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, including supporters and members of ISIS, who were marked by bloody, criminal offenses in the territory of a number of European countries. We don't wish Europe anything bad. It is up to her to decide what to do.

The events of the "Arab Spring" led to a huge number of illegal migrants. The Europeans decided to give them a legal status, began to place them on their territory, to agree on distribution quotas. The problem of the "Arab Spring" was created by aggression, first of all, against Libya. This country was bombed, it turned into a "black hole". It was through this state that the flow of refugees and illegal immigrants poured into Europe, and in the opposite direction - to the Sahara-Sahel zone - terrorists and smuggled weapons rushed. African countries are still "unraveling" the consequences of the Libyan adventure, and the European Union - the appearance of a huge number of people without a certain kind of occupation, not all of whom decided to become law-abiding residents of certain countries.

Europe created such a situation in Ukraine because it categorically refused to force Petr Poroshenko and then V.A. Zelensky to implement the Minsk Agreements. The EU indulged Kiev's openly announced line for the implementation of "Plan B" – the seizure of Donbass by force. This was the reason for our special military operation. Over the years, we have seen the futility of trying to persuade the West to agree to an equal, mutually respectful agreement to ensure universal security without expanding the North Atlantic Alliance.

In this regard, Europe also acts to a certain extent as the "author" of the current situation. I hope that after the experience with the "Arab Spring", the current Ukrainian "wave" will be perceived in the European Union as information for reflection, but so far the EU countries do not think much about themselves. German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbok said (many quote her) that she understands the problems of German voters, but now it is "more important" to meet Ukraine's needs for military assistance. With such a philosophy, Europe... I wish her luck.

Question: We live in an interesting era when the media is a dangerous weapon. In your opinion, what is the role of the media and mass media in the processes of revival, rise and flourishing of Nazism in modern Ukraine?

Sergey Lavrov: The role of the media is constantly growing, including traditional and electronic media, as well as social networks, but it is not they who "make the weather", but politicians. In recent years, we have already seen that in the West, especially in the Usa, Germany, France and other European countries, they are well able to "build" journalists, the media and ensure loyalty to the line that this or that government wants to pursue.

This is especially noticeable in the case of the Joe Biden administration, in which almost the entire line of electronic media, television, and print media is aimed at mobilizing public opinion in support of what the United States is doing in Ukraine. However, this does not always work. Now the newspapers openly criticize the indifference with which the Administration reacted to the natural disaster in Florida against the background of tens of billions of US dollars allocated to Ukraine. This shows that the authorities cannot always control the media and public opinion. In Germany, dissent in the media is virtually non-existent. All the media are "mobilized" to justify what the Germans are doing in Ukraine. In France, it's a similar situation.

Europe, through various international structures, primarily those created under the European Union, has been using open censorship for several years (it began about eight years ago) to prevent the penetration of alternative points of view into the public consciousness on the continent. A "good" example: when RT and Sputnik opened correspondent offices in Paris and tried to obtain accreditation at the Elysee Palace, they were refused. French President Emmanuel Macron himself replied to journalists' questions that "this is not a media outlet, but a tool of Moscow's propaganda." In addition, various platforms, associations for the protection of freedom in cyberspace, the independence of the media were established in the West, within the framework of which alternative sources of information were stifled under beautiful slogans.

During the events preceding the disappearance of the Soviet Union, we were so accommodating on all international platforms that it seemed that eternal general prosperity had come. In 1990, at the initiative of France and other Western states, the OSCE adopted a document obliging all members of the Organization without exception to ensure full access for their citizens to any sources of information, both at home and abroad. Therefore, the refusal of RT and Sputnik to be accredited at the Elysee Palace is a gross violation of the obligations assumed 30 years ago at the initiative of the same France.