Russia's Lavrov signals readiness to use any means in Ukraine conflict

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview broadcast on Thursday, said the use of a hypersonic missile in the Ukraine war sought to make the West understand that Moscow was ready to use any means to ensure no "strategic defeat" would be inflicted on Moscow.

Russia deployed the Oreshnik hypersonic missile against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last month in what Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin described as a test of a missile he said could not be brought down. He said Russia could bring other such missiles into action in "combat conditions" if required. "The message is that you, I mean the US and the allies of the US, who also provide these long-range weapons to the Kyiv regime - they must understand that we would be ready to use any means not to allow them to succeed in what they call a strategic defeat of Russia," Lavrov told US journalist Tucker Carlson.

"They fight for keeping their hegemony over the world, on any country, any region, any continent. We fight for our legitimate security interests."

Speaking in English, Lavrov said the West had refused to discuss upholding security guarantees for Russia in the weeks and months before the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, called a "special military operation" in Moscow.

As Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border in early 2022, Western leaders urged Moscow not to invade its smaller neighbour. French President Emmanuel Macron met Putin three weeks before the invasion, saying he had received assurances that Russia would take no action to worsen the situation.

In his comments, Lavrov said Ukraine had lost the opportunity to maintain its territorial integrity by twice rejecting proposals for a deal, once before the full-scale war began and then in talks in April 2022 in Turkey.

"We did not start this war. We had been for years and years and years sending warnings that pushing NATO closer and closer to our borders is going to create a problem," he said.

Putin sent his troops over the border from Russia and its ally Belarus, with Putin saying Moscow was defending Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine and seeking to "de-Nazify" the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv.

Red Lines

In the course of the 80-minute interview, Lavrov also said that the West should abandon any notion that Russia had no "red lines" that it would bar anyone from crossing in defending its interests.

"If they are following the logic which some Westerners have been pronouncing lately, that they don't believe that Russia has red lines, they announced their red lines, these red lines are being moved again and again, this is a very serious mistake," he said.

Lavrov dismissed as "pointless" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's peace plan first presented in late 2022 and the subsequent "victory" plan announced earlier this year.

Putin last June said that Russia was willing to hold talks with Ukraine on condition that Ukraine acknowledged Moscow's control over the four regions of the country it has annexed, though without fully controlling any of them.

Zelenskiy's plan initially called for a complete Russian withdrawal and recognition of its 1991 post-Soviet border. Last month, he said Ukraine could hold talks and leave Russia in place in the territory it holds provided government-controlled areas of Ukraine could be brought under the NATO "umbrella".