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West wages total hybrid war on Russia under pretext of Ukraine crisis, says Lavrov

14 April 2022 13:57 (UTC +04:00)

The West has initiated total hybrid war on Russia, using the Ukraine crisis as a pretext, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the conference "Digital International Relations - 2022" at the MGIMO University on Thursday, APA reports citing TASS.

"The collective West has declared actually total hybrid war against us under the pretext of the Ukraine crisis. It encompasses very diverse areas, including the information space," Russia’s top diplomat said.

As Lavrov pointed out, the West has appropriated "the title of the torch of democracy" and is "flagrantly" violating its international commitments of ensuring the freedom of expression and equal access to information, including information coming into a particular country from abroad. As the Russian foreign minister recalled, the OSCE (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) adopted numerous documents in this area in 1990-1991 "amid the euphoria over universal human values."

"As soon as the Russian Federation began to express its assessments and rely on its genuine legitimate national interests, all of the West’s commitments assumed at the time with regard to the need to provide free access to information were forgotten and buried. This is yet another indication of what methods our Western colleagues are ready to use and how they treat international law," Russia’s top diplomat said.

The West prefers to substitute international law by some rules of its own, Lavrov pointed out. "One of these rules is that the West simply shuts down access to information from corresponding sources, when it does not like it. Actually, it refuses to recognize the applicability of all these international commitments to the Russian Federation, to our media, our views and our assessment of global developments," the Russian foreign minister said.