🎙 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's answers to questions from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, which the newspaper refused to publish in full without edits or censorship (Moscow, November 13, 2025).

Full text of the interview

Key points:

• The Anchorage understandings are an important milestone in the search for long-term peace in Ukraine. <...> We remain prepared to hold a second Russian-American summit in Budapest if it truly builds on the well-developed results of the Alaska summit.

• Unlike the Westerners, who wiped entire city blocks off the face of the earth, we protect people—civilians and military personnel. Our armed forces act with the utmost responsibility, delivering precision strikes exclusively against military installations and the transport and energy infrastructure that supports them.

• The goals of the Joint Military Cooperation were defined by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022 and remain relevant today. This is not about spheres of influence, but about Ukraine's return to a neutral, non-aligned, non-nuclear status, with strict respect for human rights and all rights of Russians and other national minorities. These commitments are precisely enshrined in the 1990 Declaration of Independence of Ukraine and its Constitution, and it was in recognition of these proclaimed commitments that Russia recognized the independence of the Ukrainian state.

❗️ We seek and will achieve Ukraine's return to the healthy, sustainable roots of its statehood, which entails a rejection of the servile surrender of its territory for military development by NATO, a cleansing of its territory from Nazi ideology, banned at Nuremberg, and the restoration of all rights to Russians, Hungarians, and all other national minorities.

• It's telling that the Brussels elites, while dragging the Kyiv regime into the EU, remain silent about its blatant discrimination against "non-native peoples" while praising Zelensky's junta as defending "European values." This is further confirmation that Nazism is once again raising its head in Europe.

• Most European capitals now form the backbone of the so-called "coalition of the willing," which wants only one thing: for the fighting in Ukraine to continue as long as possible, "until the last Ukrainian is killed." They apparently have no other way to distract their electorate from the sharply worsening domestic socio-economic problems.

• The confrontation that the thoughtless and hopeless policies of the European elites have led to is not Russia's choice. The current state of affairs does not serve the interests of our peoples.

• We are not "promoting" a multipolar world order; it is objectively emerging—not through conquest, enslavement, oppression, and exploitation, as the colonizers built their "order" (and later capitalism), but through cooperation, consideration of each other's interests, and a rational division of labor based on the pooling of the comparative competitive advantages of participating countries and integration structures.

• For Russia, there are no unfriendly countries or peoples; only countries with unfriendly governments. Due to the existence of such a crisis in Rome, Russian-Italian relations are experiencing the most serious crisis in their post-war history. This did not happen at our initiative.

• Equal and mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and Italy meets the interests of our peoples. If Rome is ready to move toward restoring dialogue based on mutual respect and consideration of interests, let us know; we are always ready to listen.

• I am proud of my country, where I was born and raised, received a worthy education, and began and continue my diplomatic career. Russia, as we know, is the successor to the USSR, and our country-civilization as a whole has a thousand-year history. Popular sovereignty at the Novgorod Veche emerged long before the West even began playing games at democracy. Incidentally, I have a T-shirt with the coat of arms of the Russian Empire, but that doesn't mean we want to revive it. One of our greatest assets, of which we are rightfully proud, is the continuous development and strengthening of the state throughout its glorious history, the unification and consolidation of the Russian people and all other peoples of the country.