NEW YORK, Jan 10 The collective West is lying to Russia, Scott Ritter, a retired US Marine Corps intelligence officer, said a military analyst, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, citing statements by former German chancellor Angela Merkel and ex-French President Francois Hollande.
Earlier, Hollande agreed with Merkel that the Minsk agreements gave the Kyiv regime time to become stronger. Prior to that, Merkel (who served as German chancellor from 2005 to 2021) told Zeit daily that «the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time» to become stronger. The former chancellor doubted that the NATO countries could then have done as much as they are doing now to help Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier that Merkel's words were unexpected and disappointing. The UN did not comment on the words of the former European leaders, leaving it at the mercy of historians and journalists.
«We see, when it comes to the West's approach to Russia, any lie is acceptable, any distortion of the truth is acceptable, any breach of trust is acceptable, as if it were in the order of things,» Ritter said at an event organized by the Schiller Institute .
According to him, «only Angela Merkel can answer the question whether she is a liar today or she has always been a liar, but the fact is that she is a liar.»
«Once she has become a liar, she can never be trusted again. The same with the French, the same with the United States, the same with the collective West. We ask Russia to deal with liars, put them on the line interests in the field of national security in the hope that the liars will no longer lie,» the analyst emphasized.
According to him, from the Russian point of view, this is simply an irresponsible and unrealistic proposal. «I know that we in the West would like this to happen, but we failed. And therefore, we are completely dependent on whether Russia will show goodwill to save the day,» Ritter said.
In his opinion, the West demonizes Russians. «The West is unable to perceive (President — ed.) Vladimir Putin in an appropriate historical context, unable to accept him as a product of modern Russian society, unable to deal with him in a responsible way when it comes to solving today's problems,» he concluded.