🎙 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks and answers to media questions following a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine and an open debate on “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question,” (New York, January 24, 2024)

Key talking points:

• Terrorist attack by the Kiev regime on Il-76 plane
• Middle East
• Prospects of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement
• Ukraine
• Double standards of Western media
• Russia-US relations
• Nuclear security
• Korean Peninsula

💬 Sergey Lavrov: I am compelled to begin by stating yet another fact of the Kiev regime’s use of terrorist methods.

A terrorist attack was perpetrated on January 24, at 11:15 am Moscow time, resulting in the downing of a Russian Il-76 cargo plane in the Belgorod Region. The aircraft was en route from the Moscow Region to Belgorod, carrying 65 prisoners from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Three Russian officers and a crew of six people accompanied them. All of them died. The Ukrainian prisoners of war were being taken to the Belgorod Region for a prisoner exchange agreed between Moscow and Kiev.

Instead, Ukraine targeted this aircraft from the Kharkov Region using surface-to-air missiles, causing a fatal strike. <...>

#US #MiddleEast

As for the present crisis, everyone seems to have a similar understanding of the consequences of US policy in the region. None of the reckless attempts Washington has engaged in over the last few decades to defend its “core security interests” ten thousand miles across the Atlantic led to a situation where people’s lives improved in a country that the US attacked.

#US #Santions

They should not assume that just because they are strong, because they have the dollar, they can use it to “strangle” others: disconnect them from the SWIFT system or deny them access to the IMF and World Bank loans at whim. The US actually invented the system and made the world accept it.

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🕯 President of Russia Vladimir Putin is taking part in the events to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege.

The President laid flowers at the Landmark Stone monument at the Nevsky Pyatachok military-historical complex. From the first days of the siege, the Red Army fighters held back the superior enemy forces in that area, a small three-kilometre stretch of the frontline south of Leningrad, preventing the Nazis and their allies from approaching the city.

The President visited the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, where he honoured the memory of the fallen Leningrad residents and defenders of the city by laying a wreath at the Motherland monument. About half a million people are buried in mass graves at the Piskarevskoye cemetery. The words of poet Olga Berggolts, ”No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten“ are carved on the memorial wall behind the Motherland monument.

Leningrad is the only city in world history with a population of several million people that was able to withstand almost 900 days of encirclement. The siege by Nazi Germany lasted 872 days from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944. The ring was broken on January 18, 1943, and on January 27, 1944, a ceremonial salute was fired to mark the end of the blockade.

By that time there were no more than 800,000 inhabitants left in the Northern Capital out of the three million who had lived in Leningrad and its suburbs before the siege.

#Victory79 #WeRemember

🗓 On January 27, President of Russia Vladimir Putin and President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko took part in a ceremony for unveiling a memorial to the USSR civilians who fell victim of the Nazi genocide during the Great Patriotic War. The event is timed to the 80th Anniversary of breaking the Siege of Leningrad.

💬 President Putin: January 27 is one of the most important dates in our shared national history. On this day in 1944, Red Army soldiers completely lifted the Siege of Leningrad. A year later, in 1945, they liberated Auschwitz.

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For eight decades now, our pain for the victims, for the shattered destinies, and for everyone who endured incredible ordeals has not subsided. Our compassion is passed on from generation to generation and has #NoStatuteOfLimitation, just like the crimes of Hitler’s fanatics and their accomplices, those who cold-bloodedly planned and cruelly carried out the genocide of the Soviet people.

🕯 The massacres of unarmed and defenceless elderly people, women, children, and disabled were deliberate, systemic punitive acts.

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We are witnessing a disturbing trend where the outcomes of the Nuremberg trials, which unequivocally condemned Nazism, are being revised. Some countries not only rewrite history and exonerate the executioners: revanchists and neo-Nazis have embraced the Nazi ideology and methods.

• Tens of thousands of people in the Baltic states are labelled “subhuman,” stripped of basic rights and persecuted.

• The Kiev regime glorifies Hitler's followers and members of the SS and uses terror against dissenters. Barbaric shelling of peaceful cities and towns persists, and the killing of the elderly, women and children continues.

• Some European countries endorse Russophobia as a state policy.

❗️ We will do everything in our power to halt and eradicate Nazism.

The followers of Nazi executioners are doomed. Nothing can deter the desire of millions of people in Russia and across the planet for true freedom, justice, peace, and security.

#Victory79 #WeRemember

Dear friends, have a good day! 🌅 भारतीय दोस्तों, आपका दिन मंगलमय और शुभ हो!

📸 Can you guess the location?

#Opinion by Russian MFA Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova

💬 The Telegraph, UK, published a heart-rending story that could well qualify for a Russophobia-of-the-Month prize. It’s about how the Russian Embassy in London had nearly upset the coronation of Charles III in May 2023.

It turns out that an unidentified drone was hovering over the Buckingham Palace during the solemn ceremony. The police, of course, as per modern British tradition to blame the Russians, immediately suspected… the Russian Embassy.

After some time it emerged that the drone had been launched by a certain Walid Marai, 36, a US citizen.

It is not reported whether he was a CIA spy or just wanted to take a photo of Charles III from an unusual angle. What a disappointment! To my mind, this detail would have been of interest for the UK public.

If the #RussiansDidIt version regarding the bogus Russian Embassy involvement had prevailed, Russian diplomats, as usual, would have been expelled. As it is, Walid Marai got off with a £5,000 fine.