Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Tucker Carlson in Moscow for an interview published yesterday. The two spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war and the risk of nuclear war between Russia and the West due to recent escalations in the conflict. Lavrov addressed Ukraine’s use of U.S.-manufactured Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and the Russian response of testing nonnuclear Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs).
Carlson started the interview asking if the United States and Russia are at war with each other. Lavrov responded that he doesn’t believe so, despite the use of ATACMS and Oreshnik IRBMs:
I wouldn’t say so. And in any case, this is not what we want. We would like to have normal relations with all our neighbors, of course, but generally with all countries … especially with a great country like the United States…. We don’t want to aggravate the situation, but since ATACMS and other long-range weapons are being used against mainland Russia, as it were, we are sending signals. We hope that the last one, a couple of weeks ago, the signal with the new weapon system called Oreshnik, was taken seriously.
Lavrov alleged that Western involvement in Ukraine is part of its goal of maintaining U.S. global hegemony and inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia by obtaining Ukraine’s natural resources and rare earth metals:
They fight for keeping their hegemony over the world — on any country, any region, any continent. We fight for our legitimate security interests. They say, for example, 1991 borders. [Senator] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.], who visited some time ago [Volodymyr] Zelensky for another talk — he bluntly, in the presence of Zelensky, I think, said that “Ukraine is very rich with rare earth metals and we cannot leave this richness to the Russians. We must take it.”… So they fight for the regime which is ready to sell or to give to the West all the natural and human resources. We fight for the people who have been living on these lands, whose ancestors were actually developing those lands, building cities, building factories for centuries and centuries. We care about people, not about natural resources which somebody in the United States would like to keep and to have Ukrainians just as servants sitting on these natural resources.
Carlson noted that Barack Obama left Donald Trump in a difficult diplomatic position during his first administration, and that Trump will inherit a similar situation from the outgoing Biden administration. Lavrov said that U.S. foreign policy has consistently caused chaos globally, noting the situations left in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan following U.S. foreign intervention:
There is nothing new, frankly. Because the U.S., historically, in foreign policy, was motivated by making some trouble and then to see if they can fish in the muddy water. Iraqi aggression, Libyan adventure — ruining the state, basically. Fleeing from Afghanistan, now trying to get back through the back door, using the United Nations to organize some “event” where the U.S. can be present, in spite of the fact that they left Afghanistan in very bad shape and arrested money and don’t want to give it back. I think this is, if you analyze the American foreign policy steps — adventures, most of them, is the right word — that’s the pattern. They create some trouble, and then they see how to use it.
