War-hawks in NATO and the EU have tried to use Kiev as a battering ram against Moscow, the foreign minister has said

Western war-hawks will not succeed in inflicting a "strategic defeat" on Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. He made the remark during talks with his Kyrgyz counterpart, Jeenbek Kulubaev, on Sunday during an official visit to Kyrgyzstan.

According to Lavrov, NATO and the EU are using the Ukraine conflict as a weapon against Russia.

"We are witnessing an unprecedented confrontation between our country and the collective West, which has decided to once again go to war against us and inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, essentially using the Nazi regime in Kiev as a battering ram," he stated. "The West has never succeeded in this, and it will not succeed this time either."

Lavrov said many Western policymakers "are beginning to guess" that their hawkish approach to Russia is futile, without elaborating. His remarks echo Moscow's earlier warnings against Western support for the Kiev regime and militarization by NATO and the EU.

At a recent EU summit in Brussels, most member states backed more sanctions and aid for Ukraine. Hungary, however,vetoedthe final statement and blocked Kiev's EU accession talks.

Russia previously took a neutral stance on Ukraine's EU bid, calling it a "sovereign right" as long as it remains an economic bloc. But with Brussels ramping up military spending, Russian officials have growncritical. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman and former President Dmitry Medvedev has said the EU is now "no less of a threat" to Russia than NATO.

Moscow considers NATO expansion toward its borders to be a major national security threat, and has said the military bloc's support for Ukrainian membership is one of the root causes of the conflict.

Russian officials slammed the bloc's decision this week for member states to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, which was presented as a way to deter the alleged "long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security."

Moscow has denied that it has any intention of attacking Western states, dismissing the claims as "nonsense" used to justify a military buildup. Russian President Vladimir Putin accused NATO of fabricating threats to extract money from citizens of member states.

(RT.com)