Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has issued new comments on the incoming Trump administration at a moment his cabinet picks are being reported daily, including ‘Russia-friendly’ Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence.

Lavrov in the wide-ranging interview on state-owned channel Russia-1 articulated that Moscow’s view is that Washington’s stance on the Ukraine conflict is unlikely to change significantly even under the Trump administration.

He explained that the United States will essentially always seek to dominate areas which fall under NATO influence, and that Trump too is likely to do the same, despite campaign promises to rapidly achieve a peace deal ending the conflict.

Ultimately, Lavrov’s position is that it doesn’t matter who is president of the US. Below is what he said according to Russian media translation:

“I have no doubt that they will want to keep these processes under their control… Washington’s attitude towards Ukrainian affairs and European affairs will not change in principle, in the sense that Washington will always strive to keep under its watchful eye everything that happens in the areas near NATO and the NATO area itself.”

The top Russian diplomat was also asked about recent widespread reporting that Trump is mulling concrete plans to ‘freeze’ the conflict while pressuring Kiev to give up its aspirations to join the NATO alliance for at least 20 years.

“Some [Western politicians] have started to look more soberly at the Ukrainian situation and say, ‘what’s lost is lost, let’s somehow freeze this entire thing.’ Yet… they still suggest having a truce along the contact line for ten years. These would be the same Minsk accords in a new wrapping, or even worse,” Lavrov said. The Kremlin’s position is that Minsk was a sham, and was simply used to buy time while the West armed Ukraine.

“The Minsk accords were final. They were about a small part of Donbass, to be honest. But everything collapsed because [the Kiev regime] categorically did not want to grant this part of Donbass – which would have remained part of Ukraine – special status, primarily in the form of the right to speak their native language,” Lavrov explained further.

He additionally asserted that a key cause of the war was the “deliberate extermination of everything Russian” in Donbass, and thus Russia will insist that any deal to end the war must guarantee protections for Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.

Tulsi was 100% right and only looks better in hindsight for having the courage to say it. https://t.co/IpUSor5cg8

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) November 14, 2024

The Zelensky government has long waged a campaign to suppress Russian culture and language from public discourse, despite some one-third of the country using Russian as a first language. More than half the population also knows Russian, even when Ukrainian is used as their first language.

In addition, the Ukrainian government has been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church because it maintains communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, seizing churches and monasteries in the process, and arresting bishops.