The head of Russian foreign intelligence (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, accused Thursday in a text threatening the West of seeking to "destroy" Russia, justifying the invasion of Ukraine by the will of Kiev, according to him, to equip with nuclear weapons.
“The masks are falling.
The West is not just trying to surround Russia with a new
iron curtain
.
These are attempts to destroy our state - to
cancel
it, ”he said in a long text returning to the recent history of Russian-Western relations.
“Today, the war has approached the very borders of our homeland.
So for us it is not exactly (a)
cold
war , but rather a
hot
one,” Sergei Naryshkin continued.
He was among the cadres of Vladimir Putin's system present and staged on television during a crisis meeting preceding the war in Ukraine on February 21.
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Assuring that Russia had "a spiritual mission", Sergei Naryshkin judged that "before our eyes a fundamentally new stage in European and world history is unfolding" with "the collapse of a unipolar world" where the United States dictate their law.
Criticizing like Vladimir Putin the enlargement of NATO over the past thirty years and the "cultural genocide" of Russian speakers in the former USSR and Ukraine, he accused Westerners of seeking to "establish an economic, informative and humanitarian blockade from Russia.
According to the boss of the Russian foreign intelligence services, the invasion of Ukraine is justified by the fact that Kiev has expressed the desire to acquire nuclear weapons.
He reiterated Moscow's goal of “demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian state”.
Ukraine has never mentioned nuclear ambitions.
Its president, on the other hand, considered that a 1994 agreement - the Budapest memorandum - seemed obsolete, because it provides for respect for Ukrainian territorial integrity by Russia, in exchange for Kiev giving up its Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had called for consultations on this subject.