🎙 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks and answers to questions at the roundtable discussion “The Ukraine Crisis: The West’s Legal Aggression” (Moscow, September 15, 2026)

Key points:

• The history of the Ukrainian crisis is a textbook example of how the West and its puppets consistently disregard their international obligations, to put it mildly.

• Even the most fundamental human right – the right to life – is not respected in Ukraine. You regularly see footage of “human catchers” rounding up young men, and also not-so-young men, on the streets of Ukrainian cities. I have no doubt that they will soon start going after women as well.

• The West is fond of interpreting the UN Charter, but only selectively and in its own interests, cherry-picking the specific principles and articles that suit its political plans at any given moment.

• “Legal aggression” against Russia has a long history. The European Court of Human Rights was regularly used for this purpose even before the events in Ukraine. Since 2014, however, this aggression has become systematic. It began with attempts to delegitimise the historic choice made by the people of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya.

• In January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered its final judgment – it recognised that Russia had not financed terrorism; that the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics were not terrorist organisations; that there was no discrimination against Crimean Tatars or Ukrainians in Crimea; and that the ban on the extremist organisation Mejlis was lawful.

• Ukraine’s second case against Russia also failed. It was filed in February 2022, when Kiev accused us of abusing the Genocide Convention by defending the people of Donbass against genocide. In February 2024, the Court ruled that Russia’s actions had not violated the Genocide Convention. Full stop. All accusations against Russia were dismissed.

• In 2016, Ukraine initiated arbitration proceedings under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in an attempt to challenge Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, restored in accordance with the freely expressed will of the peninsula’s residents. On June 15, 2026, the arbitral tribunal to which Ukraine had brought its case upheld Russia’s position in its final award.

• Ukraine lost every one of the said cases. They were brought in bad faith from the outset. Both the Kiev regime and its Western handlers knew that their claims were unfounded and, in some instances, had no connection whatsoever to the subject matter of the respective conventions.

• Russia is, of course, not the only country facing the West’s “legal aggression” – any country in the world could become a target. Any state’s gold and foreign exchange reserves held in Western depositories could be frozen.

☝️ Protecting the international justice system and international law as a whole from bad-faith politicisation serves the interests of all sensible states that have their national interests in mind.

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