"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.

"It's becoming contagious when somebody sees an American talking to me or a European talking to me. Europeans are running away when they see me. During the last G20 meeting, it was ridiculous. Grown-up people, mature people. They behave like kids. So childish. Unbelievable," Russian Foreign Minister told American journalist.

"[US Secretary of State Antony Blinken] said something about the need to de-escalate and so on and so forth. I hope he's not going to be angry with me since I am disclosing this: but we were meeting in front of many people present in the room, and I said, 'We don't want to escalate. You want to inflict strategic defeat upon Russia.' He said, 'No. It is not strategic defeat globally. It is only in Ukraine.'" Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recalled to Tucker Carlson, referencing his last meeting with his US counterpart at the G20 Summit in Rome in October 2021.

Promoting separatism is "what the Americans are doing in the east of Syria when they groom some Kurdish separatists using the profits from oil and grain sold, the resources which they occupy," Lavrov said.

"I think he's a very strong person. A person who wants results. Who doesn't like procrastination on anything. This is my impression. He's very friendly in discussions. But this does not mean that he's pro-Russian as some people try to present him. The amount of sanctions we received under the Trump administration was very big," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recalled in his interview with Tucker Carlson.

"And the same was reiterated bilaterally between Russia and the United States, Putin and Biden, when they met in 2021 in Geneva…This is absolutely in our vital interest, and we hope that this is also in vital interest of the United States," Lavrov stressed.