All week, while the regular session of the UN General Assembly was held in New York, Russian propaganda tried to create the impression that Russia was not isolated. The representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova distinguished herself the most. First, on the air of the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov program, she boasted that the European delegates also dream of talking to the Russian minister.
Regarding whether there are requests from Westerners to communicate with the Russian delegation at the UN headquarters. <…> These same Western grandees, including the European Union, began to request a meeting with us. Do you want names? I have them: [Catherine] Colonna (France), [Annalena] Berbock (Germany), another representative of [one of the countries] of Northern Europe requested a meeting with Lavrov.
However, no confirmation from European politicians followed. Instead, Catherine Colonna said at the Security Council that France would send even more specialists to Ukraine to investigate Russian war crimes, and Annalena Burbock noted that Russian military aggression is a threat to the entire European world order.
Then Zakharova had to make excuses. First she wrote:
Then, on the air of the Russia 24 TV channel, a representative of the Foreign Ministry said that the European delegates refused to meet with Lavrov, allegedly on direct orders from Washington.
In general, the self-isolation of the West continues, but this proves that there is a single decision-making center that directs all EU policy, and it is not in Brussels, but in Washington. Because, understand, there are no such strange coincidences that yesterday they directly requested a meeting, received options for holding it, and then simply withdrew, it also became clear through other states that an order had been received not to communicate with our country.
Since the meeting was already even announced, the traditional meeting with the President of Cyprus, which takes place on the sidelines of the session of the [UN] General Assembly every year. Well, [President of the Republic of Cyprus] Nikos [Anastasiades] had the courage to tell that such a “stick” discipline forbade the European Union to hold a meeting.
Lavrov said approximately the same thing at a press conference on the results of the General Assembly – only in his interpretation of Anastasiadis it was not Washington that forced Anastasiadis to cancel the meeting with him, but still Brussels.
An hour before we were supposed to meet, Mr. Anastasiades' protocol informed our protocol that he was not allowed by the European Union to meet with me – verbatim.
Anastasiadis himself did not publicly state anything about the canceled meeting with Lavrov, however, Marios Pelecanos, a spokesman for the Cypriot government, explained that the negotiations were planned even before Vladimir Putin announced a "referendum" on the annexation of Ukrainian territories. For Cyprus, this is an extremely painful issue due to the situation with Northern Cyprus, which is under Turkish occupation and which Istanbul has been wanting to annex for many years. Instructions from Brussels were indeed received – however, after the EU foreign ministers jointly decided to impose new sanctions against Russia. Well, the "invisible hand of Washington", as we see, has nothing to do with it.