The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is just one facet of the West’s campaign to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. He added that the war is “just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s been pretty clear that the West is already in a proxy war with Russia. Moscow has repeatedly threatened the countries that supply Ukraine with weapons and military aid while the West continues to insist that it’s not a part of the war.

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In an interview with Izvestia published on Friday and reported on by RT, Lavrov stated that after the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, the new Ukrainian authorities unleashed “a war… against their own people” in Donbass. The hostilities, the minister said, were only stopped by the now-defunct Minsk agreements, which were designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The rulers, both ex-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky cracked down on the Russian language and culture, introducing stringent restrictions targeting its use in all aspects of life, according to Lavrov.

Moscow repeatedly urged Kiev’s backers in the West to condemn and halt the discriminatory policies, which also violate Ukraine’s constitution, but “not one of the Western countries that are now shielding Ukraine from all accusations has ever publicly condemned these absolutely illegal actions,” he insisted.

“The only explanation is that Ukraine is the tip of the iceberg. And that the declared goal of the West is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” Lavrov was quoted as saying. Lavrov added that in practice, this implies that those who do the West’s bidding when it comes to this mission, “are allowed to do anything, including direct support for… Nazism. It is sad”.

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On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Ukraine conflict could have been easily avoided if the West had taken Moscow’s security interests into account. However, those interests “were completely ignored” as NATO moved closer to Russia’s borders by incorporating Eastern European states and former Soviet republics, Putin added. –RT

Russia’s rulers, in general, have repeatedly said that the goal in Ukraine was to “denazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine.