Lavrov’s Latest Interview: A Masterclass in Russian Desperate Self-Deceit

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s July 29, 2026, interview with TASS was designed to project steadiness, purpose, and ideological confidence. Instead, it exposed something closer to unease, if not a sense of gloom. Behind the familiar accusations, selective history, and mystical flourishes was the portrait of an authoritarian, rapacious state that knows it is losing ground – not only on the battlefield, but morally, economically, and historically on the global scene.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Lavrov set out to explain Russia to the world. What came through was the Kremlin’s anxiety: fear of internal fracture, reluctance to acknowledge military failure, dependence on Soviet nostalgia, and the need to cast Ukraine, the West, and even modern Germany as heirs to Nazism. Confident powers do not speak this way. Belligerent empires aware of their decline have little option. One of the interview’s most revealing threads is Lavrov’s fixation on supposed Western schemes to “partition” or “decolonize” Russia. He warns of separatists, exile groups, and underground efforts to break up the Russian Federation. Yet a secure state would not devote so much diplomatic energy to hypothetical dismemberment. The insistence itself betrays the Kremlin’s awareness of Russia’s fragility: a vast imperial structure held together less by consent than by coercion, extraction, and fear. Other Topics of Interest Russian Missile Kills Family of 10 in Dnipropetrovsk Region Strike The strike completely destroyed two private homes and damaged five others. Several fires broke out but have been extinguished by emergency crews. His complaints about NATO expansion and the Baltic states carry the same insecurity. Lavrov still fumes that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO after decades of Soviet occupation, dismissing their fear of Russia as Western manipulation. But he cannot credibly claim they were wrong to be afraid. Today he presents three small democracies, with a combined population of roughly six million, as a menace to a giant nuclear power. That is grievance dressed up as strategy. The pattern continues in his remarks on Ukraine. Lavrov boasts that Russia is making “daily progress,” then concedes it is moving “not as quickly as we would like” because Moscow is supposedly “sparing lives.” Stripped of diplomatic varnish, the admission is plain: Casualties are high, advances are slow, and victory remains elusive. His complaint that Ukraine still has long-range weapons capable of reaching their targets is another inadvertent acknowledgment that Kyiv, despite Western efforts to hold it back for fear of “escalation,” has developed a serious offensive capacity deep into the war. A winning power dictates terms. It does not complain that a ceasefire would leave its victim undefeated. His rejection of ceasefire proposals that would freeze the line of contact is even more telling. Lavrov says such an outcome would leave the “Nazi regime” in place and Ukraine unwilling to recognize Russian annexations. In other words, Moscow has not achieved its political or territorial goals. A winning power dictates terms. It does not complain that a ceasefire would leave its victim undefeated. Unable to point to success in the present, Lavrov retreats to the past. He invokes Soviet industrialization, victory in World War II, and even the sentimental symbolism of wearing a USSR sweater. He praises a state that collapsed more than three decades ago because today’s Russia offers so little to celebrate. He cannot point to innovation that has transformed the world, a political model others freely emulate, or soft power that attracts open societies. He can only ask listeners to remember when Moscow mattered more. That dependence on Soviet glory reaches its most grotesque form in Lavrov’s claim that Russia is once again fighting Nazism. He insists that today’s Ukrainians are the “direct followers” of those defeated in 1945. The inversion is obscene. In World War II, the totalitarian Stalinist Soviet Union was suddenly invaded by its fascist ally, Hitler’s Nazi Germany; today, Russia has invaded democratic and Europe-oriented Ukraine. Then, Moscow was forced to fight alongside Western democracies; now, those democracies support Ukraine against Moscow’s aggression. Ukraine’s president and Churchillian war leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, and his family suffered in the Holocaust. To call his government Nazi is not merely false. It is an assault on memory itself. For that matter, the Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces from 2024 until this month was Oleksander Syrsky, an ethnic Russian. The hypocrisy is sharpened by what Lavrov omits: Russia’s own history of despotism and mass violence. Lavrov’s accusations against Germany belong to the same moral fog. He suggests that Chancellor Friedrich Merz seeks renewed German domination in Europe, ignoring a modern German foreign policy still shaped by historical responsibility, multilateral caution and democratic constraint. The point is not persuasion but confusion: Russia invades and calls itself the victim; Russia practices imperial domination and denounces imperialism; Russia represses its own society and lectures others about freedom. The hypocrisy is sharpened by what Lavrov omits: Russia’s own history of despotism and mass violence. Tsarist autocracy ruled through secret police, exile and conquest. Stalin’s terror killed and imprisoned millions. The Holodomor starved Ukraine. The Gulag consumed lives on an industrial scale. Entire peoples – Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans and others – were deported as collective punishment. Yet Lavrov wears Soviet nostalgia as a badge of honor, praising industrialization without forced labor and celebrating “coexistence” among languages without Russification and cultural destruction. Putin’s Russia has not broken with that tradition; it has refurbished it. Opposition figures have been killed, jailed, exiled or silenced. Independent media has been crushed. Elections have become rituals of loyalty. Courts serve power. Civil society is treated as treason. When Lavrov speaks of Russia as a civilization with “traditional values,” he is describing a political culture in which the state dominates the individual, violence is mistaken for strength, and neighboring peoples are treated not as equals but as subjects. In this context, Russia, following its chauvinistic tradition, claims the right to dominate and Russify non-Russians who fall under its influence. That imperial logic is clearest in the war against Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion, disproportionate numbers of soldiers have come from poor and non-Russian regions: Buryatia, Dagestan, Tuva, Kalmykia, Yakutia, the North Caucasus, and beyond. Moscow recruits from the periphery, offers sums that matter in impoverished communities, and spends those lives in assaults from which metropolitan Russia has been largely shielded. To acknowledge Ukraine’s self-determination as legitimate would endanger the myth on which Russia’s internal empire rests. This is why Ukraine’s resistance matters beyond Ukraine. If it can defy Moscow and survive as a sovereign democracy, it challenges the logic of Russian imperial power. If Ukrainians can reject domination, why not others historically subordinated by Moscow? Every Ukrainian success on the battlefield is therefore more than a military setback for Russia. It is a crack in the edifice Lavrov is trying to defend. It also explains why he must call Ukrainian independence “Nazism” and Ukrainian democracy a Western puppet show. To acknowledge Ukraine’s self-determination as legitimate would endanger the myth on which Russia’s internal empire rests. It would suggest that Moscow’s rule is not destiny, imperial domination is not civilization, and peoples absorbed or subdued by Russia have the right to imagine futures outside the Kremlin’s control. Perhaps the strangest part of the interview is Lavrov’s turn to divine providence. He describes Boris Yeltsin’s transfer of power to Vladimir Putin as evidence that Russia is “touched by God,” and says that when matters become dire, help arrives “from above.” He even recounts personal experiences he interprets as miracles. This is not the language of a modern state explaining strategy. It is the language of a regime seeking legitimacy where argument has failed. A confident power does not need dead empires, divine miracles and Nazi fantasies to explain itself. Lavrov’s silences matter as much as his claims. He does not say Russia is winning decisively. He does not say Ukraine is close to surrender. He offers no credible path to victory. Nor does he show growing international strength, instead pointing to alternative forums as substitutes for exclusion from the global mainstream. A foreign minister who avoids victory, strategy, public support and international standing has little positive to report. The conclusion is hard to escape. Lavrov’s interview was meant as a show of confidence, but it exposes a Russia trapped by its own myths. It has no persuasive vision for the future, only nostalgia for Soviet power, resentment toward independent neighbors, and accusations so extreme they collapse under their own weight. It calls aggression defense, chauvinist empire civilization, repression stability, and memory treason. For Ukraine, the message is that resistance is working. Russia’s rhetoric grows more frantic as Ukraine’s survival becomes harder to deny. For the West, the lesson is just as clear: Russia is weaker than its threats suggest. A confident power does not need dead empires, divine miracles and Nazi fantasies to explain itself. Lavrov’s interview offers a map of Russian weakness. It shows an aging imperial state clinging to myths because reality offers too little comfort. Russia is not 10 feet tall. It is not divinely chosen. It is a declining power fighting a war it cannot admit it is not winning – and everything else is noise and obfuscation. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.