Ucraina (și Gruzia), pe scurt

SL. (memorare, memorare)

Question (retranslated from Polish): Why, in your opinion, have the states that emerged from the collapse of the USSR, for example, Ukraine and Georgia, chosen to integrate with the West – the EU and NATO – even at the cost of war with Russia, instead of maintaining relations with Russia? I am asking about this because of Russia’s military intervention in Georgia, as well as the presence of Russian troops in Belarus and the persecution of organisations like Memorial in Russia. Might it be more effective to opt for dialogue with Poland, as proposed during Poland’s OSCE Chairmanship? Is Russia ready to accept this proposal given the sanctions that the West has already promised to impose and that may have a damaging effect on the Russian economy?

Sergey Lavrov: The main reason for this is that the governments of those countries proved to be incompetent and did so in a situation when someone else was seeking to establish external control over them and, finally, achieved this. The only objective they were pursuing was to have them break away from Russia, so they end up in NATO’s sphere of influence. This also flies in the face of the principle of the indivisibility of security, because renouncing spheres of influence is part of this principle. In 2008, when at a NATO summit in Bucharest pledges were made to admit Georgia and Ukraine as members of this organisation, Mikheil Saakashvili seemed to have lost his head, he lost his mind. A couple of weeks before he gave the order to attack the peaceful city of Tskhinval and the position of Russian peacekeepers, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited him.

At one time there was a US representative at NATO, whose name was Ivo Daalder. He called the decision to offer Georgia and Ukraine the prospect of joining NATO a major mistake. The Russian peacekeepers were attacked at a time when neither the president of the country nor its prime minister were in Moscow. Georgia seriously wanted to occupy South Ossetia and afterwards do there what it had wanted to do for a long time. Earlier, Zviad Gamsakhurdia used to say that Ossetians and Abkhazians had to go home. In order to prevent this act of genocide, in full compliance with international law and in response to the attack on Russian peacekeepers, who were in Georgia under the mandate approved by the OSCE and Tbilisi, we sent troops to the area. This was the declaration of war. There is no other interpretation of this in international law. [We did this] to defend these peoples and their aspiration for independence and after they held referenda and asked us for recognition, we recognised them.  At their request, we deployed military bases there, so that Georgians do not even think of committing crimes like these.

As for Ukraine, there was no lack of goodwill on our part either. The Western colleagues, including primarily the EU members, behaved extremely arrogantly. This started the processes that eventually “exploded” on the Maidan in February 2014.  Let me remind you that Ukraine spent the whole of 2013 negotiating the Association Agreement with the EU, which should have been signed in December 2013. When Russia learned about this, its representatives told the Ukrainian colleagues that if the agreement contained some elements of a free trade area, Russia and Ukraine had long maintained a free trade area as part of the Commonwealth of Independent States.   It was necessary to ascertain that the regimes of both FTAs would not clash, because Russia charged no [customs] duties in its trade with Ukraine, while duties were paid in the course of Russia’s commercial exchanges with Europe. While negotiating with the WTO, we have managed to get a fairly strong protection on many points. If Ukraine suddenly lifted the barriers with the EU (Russia and Ukraine have no barriers with one another either), goods from Europe would have poured in despite the agreements we had reached when joining the WTO. We were honest in warning them. We also warned your superiors in the EU, I am referring to Poland as a member of this association.  President of Russia Vladimir Putin contacted [the then] President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso and suggested that Russia, Ukraine and the EU create a trilateral group to avoid any mishaps in the purely commercial sphere.  Mr Barroso declared in his characteristic  haughty manner that the EU would not discuss with Russia how it was building up its relations with Ukraine, because, after all, Russia was not discussing with the EU how it was building up its relations with the People’s Republic of China.

It was the EU that was “egging on” the Maidan in every possible way. The Maidan was launched after the mobilisation of a “team” that condemned President Yanukovych’s decision to postpone the signing of the agreement with the EU until it became clear whether or not differences could arise between the two trade regimes. That is all there was to it. But certain Europeans took advantage of the hitch. European foreign ministers, specifically the foreign minister of Belgium, claimed even before this, and later on reasserted their claim, that the Ukrainians should decide whose side they were on – Russia’s or Europe’s. This is precisely the mentality that sows the “seeds” you have mentioned.

Why do certain representatives of specific countries want to be friends with NATO rather than Russia? Because these representatives are not moving in that direction independently, they are doing this at the instruction of puppet-masters, who are keen to split Europe rather than enforce the OSCE’s principles. When the Maidan led to bloodshed, Poland in the person of Radoslaw Sikorski, Germany in the person of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and France in the person of Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius held talks in Kiev and convinced the opposition and President Viktor Yanukovych to sign a peace agreement. They guaranteed this peace agreement by their signatures. But the “Kiev junta” that came to power virtually 24 hours later did not care a dime about these signatures and violated all its commitments. In his remarks following his election as FRG president, Frank Walter Steinmeier called on Russia to “take the noose off” Ukraine’s neck. But this is incorrect from the point of view of the gnosiology of all this conflict. The conflict could have been cut short immediately, if Europe, primarily the three countries that guaranteed the agreement between Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition, had called the latter to order and made them implement what they had signed.

After the coup materialised, the first instinct of those who seized power was to put forward Russophobic demands like renouncing the status of the Russian language enshrined in Ukrainian law, or chasing Russians from Crimea. These calls were accompanied by the sending of teams of armed thugs to storm the Supreme Council of Crimea. All of this is in the history books. I understand that you need to “sell” today’s news: don’t you feel sad seeing everyone flee from you into the arms of NATO and the EU?  This is a simplistic approach that will enable you to attract readers, hungry for all kinds of sensationalism of this sort and for the Russophobia that is flourishing, to my strong regret, in Poland, among other countries. We said today that we are interested in having normal relations with Poland, the more so since contacts have never ceased at the level of civil society, artists and culture – to the satisfaction of both sides.

When all this happened, the residents of Crimea had to defend themselves from outright neo-Nazis, who are still staging torch marches in Kiev, carrying portraits of Bandera, Petlyura, and Shukhevich. By the way, their official leader, the President of Ukraine, is supporting them.  It was only after the Crimeans refused to obey these mobsters, who had seized power in an unconstitutional coup d’etat, and only when the Crimeans held an [independence] referendum that Europe became agitated and started saying: “Why has Russia annexed Crimea?” But why was Europe silent and unperturbed by the Ukrainian coup? Obviously because those capitals, including the three countries whose ministers signed the agreement, which was later broken by the coup perpetrators, were also willing to side with the people who had proclaimed that they were for the West, not for Russia, despite the anti-constitutional coup and the ensuing bloodshed. That’s it. As the saying goes, this is a two-lane street. Everywhere there are people ready to speculate on the West’s geopolitical plans, but these plans, regrettably, are aimed at disunity, not at implementing the fundamental principles of the OSCE.