Lavrov Warns NATO: If You Play with Fire, You will Get Burned

Aug. 28—At an Aug..27 press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov cited as “blackmail” Ukraine’s demand that it be allowed to use Western weapons to strike Moscow and St. Petersburg. He reminded the world that Russia has a nuclear weapons use policy, according to the Foreign Ministry website:

“This is blackmail, an attempt to pretend that the West seeks to avoid any excessive escalation. In reality, they are full of mischief. Avoiding escalation is not what the West is after. To put it into plain language, they are simply picking a fight. I think that this has become obvious to everyone,” he said responding to media questions following his meeting with Yemeni Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Shaya al-Zindani in Moscow.

Lavrov warned that the West was playing with fire whenever it started discussions on this topic.

“We have long been hearing speculation about authorizing Ukraine to use not only the Storm Shadow missiles, but also U.S.-made long-range missiles. There was an anonymous source in Washington who said that they were working on it. This source purported that their overall view of Ukraine’s request is quite positive. I will stop at that. President Vladimir Putin said all about it quite a while ago.

“Now, all we can do is confirm once again that playing with fire is a dangerous thing for the men and women in charge of nuclear weapons across the Western world, but they are playing with matches as if they never grew up.”

As an example of the thinking behind this, Lavrov cited one of the statements by the White House National Security Communications Director John Kirby, who had previously called escalation dangerous because, in the event of a world war, Europe would suffer:

“I have recently cited John Kirby, who is the White House National Security Communications Drector. A couple of months ago, he said that escalation would be dangerous, since it would be extremely ill-advised to let the situation slide into a world war and that Europe would be the one to suffer in the process. Recently, John Kirby said this again. For Americans, any talk about the third world war comes down to something that would affect Europe alone, and God forbid if it ever happened. This is quite telling, since this idea reflects the mindset of the American planners and geostrategy experts who believe that they can simply sit the whole thing out. I think that it is important to understand in this situation that we have our own doctrine, including the one governing the use of nuclear weapons. An effort to update it is underway. Moreover, these Americans are well aware of the provisions it sets forth. This fact transpires from the Freudian slips they make when they say that having a third world war would be a bad thing because they do not want Europe to suffer. This is what this American mindset comes down to. They have a mindset of a master sitting somewhere out there overseas and believing to be totally safe and secure, thinking that not only Ukrainians, but also, as it turns out, Europeans would be willing to do the dirty work and die for them.”