Russia repeats insistence on Ukraine that it had no choice
For its war in Ukraine, Russia made its case to the world on Saturday, repeating a series of grievances about its neighbour and the West to take military action to tell the U.N. General Assembly meeting of leaders that Moscow had “no choice”. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sought to shift the focus to Washington, after days of denunciations of Russia at the prominent diplomatic gathering. The international system that the U.N. represents in his speech cantered on a claim that the United States and its allies, not Russia, as the West maintains, are aggressively undermining. To a 19th-century U.S. policy that essentially proclaimed American influence over the Western Hemisphere from the U.S. war in Iraq invoking history ranging in the early 2000s to the 20th-century Cold War. As a bully that tries to afford Lavrov portrayed the U.S. “with impunity wherever they want the sacred right to act” and can’t accept a world where others also advance their national interests. He maintai...