With a view to Western sanctions, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has spoken of a “hybrid war” directed against Moscow. “Today they declared us a real hybrid war, total war,” Lavrov said on Friday at a meeting with representatives of a diplomatic foundation, according to the state agency TASS. “This term, which was used in Hitler’s Germany, is now used by European politicians when they talk about what they want to do with the Russian Federation.”
The actual use of the term by well-known EU politicians in the past few weeks is not known. In 1943, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels called for “total war” in his notorious speech at the Sportpalast.
Maxim Shemetov/Pool Reuters/AP/dpa
Lavrov said Europe’s politicians wanted to “destroy, break, annihilate, strangle” Russia. “When we see this lawlessness of the sanctions, it is of course clear that all these values that our Western colleagues have constantly preached to us – namely freedom of expression, the market economy and the inviolability of private property, the presumption of innocence – are worthless.”
Because of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the seven leading democratic economic powers (G7) and the EU agreed on new sanctions on Thursday that are intended to make gold transactions significantly more difficult for Russia. The US also imposed new sanctions on hundreds of members of the Russian parliament and other members of the Russian elite.
The USA also announced on Friday that it would supply an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU this year together with international partners. In the long term, the amount is expected to increase to 50 billion cubic meters per year. This could replace around a third of current gas imports from Russia.