The veteran foreign minister was ridiculed at an Indian conference for suggesting that the West and Ukraine were the aggressors in the conflict.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s longstanding foreign minister, provoked laughter from an audience at an international conference in India when he attempted to portray his country as the victim of the war in Ukraine.
Addressing the Raisina Dialogue, an event in New Delhi that debates the major challenges facing the world in politics and economics and one of few such events globally that still invites Russian politicians to attend, the 72-year-old staked the unlikely claim that Russia was trying to stop the war.
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” he said to a chorus of laughs and groans.
“And the blunt way to describe what changed: we would not anymore rely on any partners in the West. We would not allow them to blow the pipelines again,” he continued, apparently referring to the explosions that caused damage to the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea in September 2022.
It wasn’t all mockery, however, for the veteran politician, who has been in post since 2004. When asked about the “double standard” of Western interventions in sovereign countries, his audience applauded his response.
“Have you been interested in these years [in] what is going on in Iraq, what is going on in Afghanistan?” he asked his interviewer.