‘Russia ready to use any means to defend itself’: Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov – Times of India

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday warned the United States and said that Russia is ready to use “any means” to defend itself.
During an interview, US media personality Tucker Carlson asked about the signal for the West that Lavrov hinted after Russia used a hypersonic weapons system in the recent escalation.
Responding to that query, the Russian foreign minister said, “Well, the message is that you, I mean you, the United States and the allies, who provide this long range weapons to the Kyiv regime, they must understand that we would be ready to use any means not to allow them to succeed in what they call strategic defeat of Russia.”
Two weeks ago, Russia fired its new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in an escalation of the almost three-year war. After using the weapon, Lavrov addressed the press and said, “We are sending signals and we hope that the last one, a couple of weeks ago, the signal with the new weapons system called Oreshnik… was taken seriously.”

In the interview with Carlson, Lavrov recalled when Lindsey Graham, US Senator who visited some time ago, told Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine is very rich with rare earth metals. “And we cannot leave this richness to the Russians. We must take it, we fight,” Lavrov quoted Graham as saying.
“So they fight for the regime which is ready to sell or to give to the west all the natural and human resources. We fight for the people who have been living on this lands whose ancestors were actually developing those lands, building cities, building factories for centuries and centuries. We care about people, not about natural resources which somebody in the United States would like to keep and to have Ukrainians just as. As servants sitting on these natural resources. So the message which we wanted to sell by testing in real action this hypersonic system is that we will be ready to do anything to defend our legitimate interest,” he added.

While he insisted that Russia does not want to escalate the situation and wants to “avoid any misunderstanding” with the US and its partners, Lavrov warned that “we will send additional messages if they don’t draw necessary conclusions.”
So we would certainly like to avoid any misunderstanding. And since the people, some people in Washington and some people in London, in Brussels seem to be not very capable to understand, we will send additional messages if they don’t draw necessary conclusions.