Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov tried to defend his country’s assault on Ukraine under sharp questioning from Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker, with Welker eventually asking, “Either the Russian military has terrible aim or you are targeting civilians. Which is it?”
“This week, Russia escalated its attacks in Ukraine,” Welker said at the start of the interview. “Just this week. Russia bombed an American-owned factory near the Hungarian border. I’ve spoken to people who, frankly, see that as a slap in the face to President Trump, to the entire peace process. Isn’t it?”
Lavrov said that Russia “never, ever… deliberately targeted any sites which are not linked to military abilities of Ukraine.”
“This is an electronics factory though, sir. This is an electronics factory. I’ve spoken to people on the ground there. It builds coffee machines, among other electronics. This is not a military site,” Welker responded.
Trump has told the press he expressed displeasure to Putin over the drone attack on the American-owned plant. “I told him I’m not happy about it,” Trump said Friday. “And I’m not happy about anything having to do with that war.”
Trump and Putin recently met at a summit in Alaska, but no tangible progress toward peace appears to have come from the meeting, despite the administration’s attempts to spin it as a success.
The president said on Friday that he would know more about progress toward a Ukraine-Russia agreement in two weeks. “Over the next two weeks we’re gonna find out which way it’s going to go, and I better be very happy,” he said. (Trump loves to claim that complex, intractable problems will be solved “in two weeks.”)
Under Welker’s questioning, Lavrov stood firm in his stance that somehow an American-owned factory was producing equipment for Ukraine.
“I understand that some people are really naive and when they see a coffee machine in the window, they believe that this is the place where coffee machines are produced,” he said. “Our intelligence has very good information, and we target only — as I said — either military enterprises, military sites or industrial enterprises directly involved in producing military equipment for Ukrainian army.”
But Welker continued to press. “Mr. Foreign Minister, here are the facts: close to 50,000 civilians have either been killed or injured in this war,” she said. “Russia has hit maternity wards, churches, schools, hospitals, a kindergarten just this past week. So either the Russian military has terrible aim or you are targeting civilians. Which is it?”
“Look, look, NBC is a very respectful structure, and I hope you are responsible for the words which you broadcast,” Lavrov said, getting testy. “I ask you to send us or to publicize the information to which you just referred because we never targeted the civilian targets of the kind you cited. You might be mixing, you know, the information because it is a fact that quite a number of churches were purposefully hit by the Ukrainian regime.”
Lavrov continued by asking for proof. Welker said that “we have reporters on the ground who’ve seen it with their own eyes.”
Russia’s assaults on civilians appear to be escalating. According to the United Nations, this past June saw the highest number of civilian casualties in the three years of the ongoing conflict. Two hundred and eighty-six civilians were killed, while another 1,674 were injured, the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission (HRMMU) in Ukraine said.
The U.N. has documented a total of 13,883 civilian deaths, including 726 children, since the war began. Another 35,548 civilians have been injured, including 2,234 children.
“Whether you are in a hospital or a prison, at home or at work, close to or far away from the frontline, if you are in Ukraine today, you are at risk of getting killed or injured by the war,” Danielle Bell, head of HRMMU said. “The risk is significantly higher than last year and it continues to rise.”
