"We don't want to aggravate the situation, but since ATACMS and other long-range weapons are being used against mainland Russia as it were, we are sending signals. We hope that the last one, a couple of weeks ago, the signal with the new weapon system called Oreshnik, was taken seriously," Lavrov said.

"The right to self-determination is the international legal basis for the decolonization process... The people in the east and south of Ukraine, people in Donbass and Novorossiya, they don't consider the Zelensky regime as something which represents their interests. How can they do that when their culture, their language, their traditions, their religion, all this was prohibited?" Lavrov asked.

"So when people say, 'Let's resolve the conflict on the basis of the Charter,' - yes. But don't forget that the Charter is not only about territorial integrity. And territorial integrity must be respected only if the governments are legitimate and if they respect the rights of their own people," Lavrov said.

"We fight for the people who have been living on these lands, whose ancestors were actually developing those lands, building cities, building factories for centuries and centuries. We care about people, not about natural resources which somebody in the US would like to keep and to have Ukrainians just as servants," Lavrov stated.

"We hate even to think about war with the United States, which will take on a nuclear character," Lavrov said. "Our military doctrine says that the most important thing is to avoid a nuclear war. And it was us, by the way, who initiated in January 2022... the joint statement by the leaders of the five permanent members of the [UN] Security Council saying that we will do anything to avoid confrontation between us."

"We did not start this war. We have been, for years and years and years, sending warnings that pushing NATO closer and closer to our borders is going to create a problem," Lavrov said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

"The former Ukrainian ambassador to Kazakhstan, Pyotr Vrublevsky, became famous when he gave an interview and looked into the camera (that was recorded and broadcast) and said: 'Our main task is to kill as many Russians as possible so that our children have less things to do,'" Lavrov noted. "And such statements are everywhere in the regime's vocabulary," he added.

"He answered 'very thoughtfully' [that] there are people and there are species. And if you, living in Ukraine, feel associated with the Russian culture, my advice to you, for the sake of your kids, for the sake of your grandkids, get out to Russia," Lavrov recalled, paraphrasing Zelensky.

"I asked when I talked to them in September, please, as professional people, try to get the names of those whose bodies were shown in Bucha. No answer," Lavrov recalled.

"He died serving the [prison] term in Russia. As far as it was reported, every now and then he felt [unwell]. Which was another reason why we continued to ask the Germans: can you show us the results you found? Because we did not find what they found. And what they did to him, I don't know," Lavrov explained.

"So I think they're doing the same thing," Lavrov said, referring to the current administration’s actions during Biden’s lame duck phase.

"No NATO. Absolutely. No military bases, no military exercises on Ukrainian soil with participation of foreign troops," Lavrov said, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said as much going back to April 2022.

"The more we live under sanctions, the more we understand that it is better to rely on yourself, and to develop mechanisms, platforms for cooperation with 'normal' countries who are not unfriendly to you, and don't mix economic interests and policies and especially politics. And we learned a lot after the sanctions started," Lavrov said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you know. They would never kill us, so they are making us stronger," Lavrov added.

"The head of the European Commission was the Portuguese José Manuel Barroso. He responded 'it is none of your business what we do with Ukraine'," Lavrov recalled.

"Through Ukraine Western Europe wants to come to our borders. And there were plans that were discussed almost openly to put British naval bases on the Sea of Azov. Crimea was eyed, you know - dreaming about creating a NATO base in Crimea, and so on and so forth," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Tucker Carlson, highlighting US and NATO policy toward Ukraine after the 2004 and 2014 coups.

"In September 2022, during the first year of the special military operation, Vladimir Zelensky, in his conviction that he would be dictating the terms of the situation ([including] to the West), signed a decree prohibiting any negotiations with Putin's government," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Tucker Carlson.

"They know our position. We are not playing double game," Lavrov emphasized, outlining Russia’s terms for peace, starting with basic rights enshrined by the UN Charter: "language rights, minority rights, national minority rights, religious rights." All of this is "fully in line with OSCE principles," the foreign minister noted.