Blinken condemns Lavrov's “tsunami of misinformation” at OSCE event
This was stated by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during the plenary session of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Malta.
"I regret that our colleague, Mr. Lavrov, has left the room, not giving the courtesy to listen to us as we listened to him. And, of course, our Russian colleague is very adept at drowning listeners in a tsunami of misinformation. So I won’t parse everything that he said, but I will just note two things," Blinken reacted to the Russian minister's lies.
In particular, he pointed to Lavrov's words about the "indivisibility of security".
"That’s right, but it cannot be and must not be a one-way street, good for Russia but not Ukraine. But let’s not fool ourselves and let’s not allow him or anyone else to fool us. This is not about and has never been about Russia’s security. This is about Mr. Putin’s imperial project to erase Ukraine from the map," Blinken said.
Against this background, the U.S. Secretary of State pointed to the statements of the Russian dictator himself, made repeatedly toward Ukraine. He recalled how Putin said back in 2008 at the NATO summit that Ukraine is not a country, and later in 2014, after the illegal annexation of Crimea, that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people." Later in 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin once again rejected the idea of a distinct Ukrainian people and nation, and a few months ago he again called Ukraine an "artificial state".
"That is what this is about. That’s what it’s always been about. And that’s why we have to stand strongly against it," Blinken stressed.
He also commented on the statement by the foreign minister of the Russian aggressor state about the sovereign right of each member state to make its own choice. "That’s exactly what this is about: the sovereign right of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people to make their own choices about the future, not to have those choices made in and by Moscow," the U.S. Secretary of State emphasized.
As Ukrinform reported earlier, a two-day OSCE Ministerial Council kicked off in Malta on Thursday. The meeting is also attended by the foreign minister of the Russian aggressor state, Sergei Lavrov.
