ISTANBUL

The West has understood that the “Ukraine project” has started failing, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday, amid a perceived war fatigue among allies who struggle to agree on more aid for Kyiv. 

Addressing a meeting in Moscow with the heads of diplomatic missions on the situation in Ukraine, where Russia began a "special military operation" nearly two years ago, Lavrov said the West cannot stop its financial support for Kyiv “not only for reasons of prestige, which they believe they have at stake and cannot lose, but also from the point of view of economic gain.”

The West, he added, allocated more than $200 billion to Ukraine in less than two years, comparing this number to the EU’s socio-economic support for the Global South and East, which he said was less than $80 billion over the past seven years.

The foreign minister argued that weapons provided by the West to Ukraine are “spreading all over the world,” saying that “illegal shipments have already been recorded in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Gaza Strip.”

“Another aspect that the West does not really want to notice is the spread of weapons that are supplied to Ukraine to various hot spots, where they are used, among other things, by extremists and terrorists,” he added.

He said West’s “absolute fixation” on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s peace formula will lead “nowhere,” claiming that the author of the 10-step peace formula unveiled in late 2022 is “undoubtedly” the West.

He termed statements by Western officials that Russia will target Baltic states, Sweden and Finland after Ukraine as “absurd.”

“We are eliminating an historical injustice. We are eliminating attempts not only to rewrite the history of the peoples of our country, but to forget this history forever and turn the modern territories on which Russians and other peoples of Russia have lived for centuries into a springboard that NATO … would use to threaten the security of Russia,” he added.