© Reuters. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks during a joint press conference with Omani Foreign Minister Sayed Badr bin Hamad bin Hamoud al-Busaidi and Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council Jassim Muhammad al-Budaiwi (both not pictured).
(Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with an Indonesian newspaper published on Wednesday that the armed confrontation in Ukraine will continue until the West abandons its plans to dominate and defeat Moscow.
Lavrov told Kompas that the goal of the “collective West led by the United States” is to consolidate its global hegemony. Lavrov is due to attend the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum in Jakarta this week, as is US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
“Why does the armed confrontation in Ukraine not end? The answer is very simple – it will continue until the West abandons its plans to maintain its hegemony and overcome its obsessive desire to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia at its hands,” according to the transcript of the interview posted on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
At the moment, there are no indications of a change in this position.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, calling it a “special military operation” to discredit its neighbor. Kiev and its allies describe the war, which has entered its seventeenth month, as aggression to seize territory.
On Wednesday, Russia launched a wave of kamikaze drone attacks on Kiev for the second day in a row, hours before President Volodymyr Zelensky was due to meet NATO leaders at a summit in Vilnius.
The West says it wants to help Ukraine win its conflict with Russia, and Western powers have supplied Kiev with large quantities of modern weapons and ammunition.
Lavrov also accused Kiev of ignoring the peace plan in Indonesia and instead promoting its own “package of ultimatums”.
Ukraine rejected the Indonesian plan, a multi-point formula that included a call for the creation of a demilitarized zone, reaffirming Kiev’s position that Russia should withdraw its forces from Ukraine.
Commenting on Myanmar’s internal conflict since the military coup in 2021, Lavrov urged the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to solve the problems through “close cooperation” with the junta and without interfering in Myanmar’s internal affairs.
It is expected that the meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers on Tuesday will address the increasing violence in Myanmar. The regional bloc prevented the military council from holding its summits for failing to implement an agreed peace plan.