By Simon Lewis and Michelle Nichols
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday told the United Nations that it was senseless to ignore alternatives to Ukraine’s peace proposals, warning the West of the danger of trying to “fight to victory with a nuclear power.”
Addressing the U.N. General Assembly, Lavrov took aim at backers of Ukraine who support Kyiv’s peace proposal.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Nine months later Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced a 10-point peace plan to bring a just end to the war on the basis of the founding U.N. Charter and international law. Moscow rejected the plan.
“I’m not going to talk here about the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is,” Lavrov said.
“Equally senseless, the Western backers of Kyiv swearing that there is no alternative to negotiations based on the infamous peace formula.”
Invoking Western allies’ plans in the 1940s to “destroy” the Soviet Union, he accused the West of trying to deal a “strategic defeat” to Russia in Ukraine.
“The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it’s true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they’re already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade,” Lavrov said.
Russia is also concerned by the Israeli strike in Beirut that killed Hezbollah’s leader, and such “political killings” had become commonplace, Lavrov said.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Paul Simao)
