Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (File | AP)
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was laughed at in Delhi when he said that the Ukraine war was "launched against us".
Lavrov claimed that Russia was trying to stop the Ukraine war, which began after its own full-scale invasion in February 2022, BBC reported.
According to Sky News, while addressing the Raisina Dialogue, an event in New Delhi that debates the major challenges facing the world in politics and economics and one of few such events globally that still invites Russian politicians to attend, the 72-year-old staked the unlikely claim that Russia was trying to stop the war.
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"The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy," he said to a chorus of laughs and groans, the Sky News report said.
However, the report added that it wasn't all mockery for the veteran politician, who has been in the post since 2004. When asked about the "double standard" of Western interventions in sovereign countries, the audience applauded his response, Sky News added.
"Have you been interested in these years [in] what is going on in Iraq, what is going on in Afghanistan?" the veteran politician asked his interviewer. "[You] believe that the United States has the right to declare a threat to its national interest, any place on earth, like they did in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria... and you don't ask them any questions?"
The mixed reaction, according to Sky News, reflects how many non-Western powers around the world view the conflict in Ukraine, seeing a certain degree of hypocrisy in how the West has different reactions dependent on its own interests.
