🎙 Remarks and answers to questions by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a lecture hosted by the Russian Znanie Society on the sidelines of the 11th Eastern Economic Forum (Vladivostok, September 3, 2026)

Key points:

• We are not building walls, nor do we want to cut ourselves off from Europe. It is Europe that has cut itself off from us. It apparently believed that our past cooperation mattered so much to Russia that we would come running back and beg: “All right, forgive us, forget what happened. Let us return – just lift the sanctions”. That is not going to happen.

• NATO and the EU – always need an enemy. Without an artificially created image of Russia as the enemy, people would get rid of their governments in the overwhelming majority of EU and NATO countries.

• When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that he would once again make Germany Europe’s leading military power, I was simply stunned. If this person does not understand what the word “again” means in this context, that is deeply troubling and extremely dangerous for Europe, which is once again becoming a source of ideas of national and racial superiority.

• Germany has Goethe-Institut branches in Moscow, St Petersburg and Novosibirsk. Of course, they will be closed after our cultural centre was expelled from Germany. Otherwise, we would have no self-respect.

• If the legislative prohibition of the Russian language in education, culture, daily life, and the media reflects European values, then Europe is welcome to revert to Nazism. The ban on the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church likewise aligns with “European values”.

• The principles on which we, and everyone else, recognised Ukraine’s independence were thrown on the scrap heap long ago. Yet the West continues to defend Ukraine as a country supposedly standing up for “European values”. Meanwhile, the EU has economically shot itself in both the foot and the head, and in other parts of the body as well, by rejecting Russian energy supplies and blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.

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