Such aggressiveness became more intense when the “collective West” understood it was impossible to make Ukraine into a platform of military containment of Russia, the foreign minister said in a conference at the Moscow Institute of International Relations.

He stated that the West “is hysterical and now tries, with its unprecedented aggression, to compensate for its inability to act according to the norms of mutual respect and equality.”

“When they understood that, for all these years, our proposals and convincing attempts were on concrete bases, in accordance with the interests of our state, then they fell into hysteria,” Lavrov added.

“Western powers will in no way be able to weaken Russia, as no one could in the past. (…) our history has had much more complicated stages, when our role and place in the international arena gave rise to the wishes of our Western partners to weaken Russia.”

The United States, Canada, Japan, countries of the European Union and others have launched an economic war against Russia, after President Vladimir Putin announced last February 24th a military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.

Over seven thousand punitive measures were enacted against the Russian Federation, including the freezing of half of the assets of the Central Bank, worth 500 billion dollars, the disconnection of the main Russian banks from the SWIFT system, and the embargo on the purchase of oil, despite which Russia continues to receive billions of dollars from the sale of hydrocarbons in other markets such as China and India.

Analysts quote concrete figures to show the boomerang effect of the restrictions, which led to an unprecedented rise in fuel prices, causing a 10 percent inflation in European countries and the United States.

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