Lavrov on TF1: “What would France do if Belgium tried to ban French? [or the UK if Ireland banned English, Sweden if Finland banned Swedish?]”

44 comments

  4. “How would France react if Belgium banned French?” With this statement in an interview with TF1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once again tried to make clear the purpose of the “Russian mission” in Ukraine, which is to “protect the Russian language and culture”.

    Russia has been saying since the beginning of the war that an intervention in the country was necessary to denazify it. According to Russia, a genocide was taking place in Ukraine against the Russians. Russian President Vladimir Putin literally said so when he announced the invasion.

    Since 24 February, the story of ‘denazification’ and ‘genocide’ has been repeated over and over again by the Russian Government, almost like a mantra. And yesterday at TF1 a variant on the same theme followed.

    The purpose of Russia’s “special military operation” is to protect the Russian language and culture. On that point Lavrov made the comparison with our country. He told the French journalist: “For the West, it was all the same what happened to the Russian language, to Russian education, to the Russian media, which were banned by law. For example, how would France react if Belgium banned the French language?”

    “Or what would England do if Ireland banned English?”, he added. In Europe, one cannot imagine that. But when it comes to Russian, nobody in Europe cares.”

    The status of Russian in Ukraine has been a matter of debate for years. Plans by the government to abolish the status of Russian as an officially recognised minority language also caused unrest in the east of the country during the Maidan revolution of 2014.

    The pro-Russian government in Ukraine fell after violent street protests and was succeeded by a government with a pro-Western stance. Since then, laws have also been passed to promote Ukrainian, much to the displeasure of Russia and pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, among others.

    **”Conquering Donbas is priority”**

    In the same conversation with TF1, Lavrov stressed that the conquest of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is an unconditional priority for Russia. Russia wants to push back the Ukrainian army and thus liberate the Donbas – including the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk – from the Ukrainian regime.

    “It looks like Luhansk is definitely within reach of the Russians,” says VRT NWS journalist Jan Balliauw who is currently in Ukraine. “There has clearly been progress over the past few weeks. By pulling together a large part of the combat troops in the east, they have surprised Ukraine. The Russians have begun to attempt to capture the cities of Severodonetsk and Lisichank with heavy street fighting. They have the upper hand at the moment, but that does not mean that they will just take control of the whole Donbas.”

    “In Donetsk the Ukrainian defences are stronger, there is hardly any progress there. The contraction of troops in the east makes the Russians more vulnerable in the south. There are signs that Ukraine has started a counterattack there, which will force the Russians to strengthen their positions there again.”

  5. Excellent point Lavrov. And the answer is ‘nothing’. Because the French, British and Swedish people do not associate speaking French, English or Swedish with being French, British or Swedish. France does not consider French speaking Canadians, Belgians, Congolese, etc. to be French. The Brits don’t consider English speaking Irish, Americans or Singaporeans to be British. The Swedish don’t consider Swedish speaking Finns to be Swedish. A Ukrainian, Estonian or Latvian who speaks Russian is not a Russian.

  9. These people have still the mentality of 90 years ago. Any constructive dialogue, if they will ever have the concept of “constructive”, has to taken in consideration this: they have the mentality of 90 years ago, when nationalism was egemonic in many countries and war was seen as a mean to express that egemony.

  10. This is a very good indicator. Since Lavrov brought it up, it means the exact opposite.

    Thus France would do absolutely nothing. Even less than nothing.

  11. Oh so now old idiot Lavrov is trying to spin the rhetoric to make it look like Russia is Ukraine’s victim by comparing it to European matters?

    Pathetic bloated Russian fucker.

  14. Oh, I know your solution. **Follow the example of Russia**. Make up a non-existing problem, invade another country, commit countless atrocities and threaten the use of nuclear weapons whilst losing the “not” war.

    That’s it, isn’t it, Lavrov? You bloody PoS.

  15. If the Flemish community tried to remove the french language from Belgium, we (France) would probably tell the Belgians that they are retards for doing so.

    And then, after 10 seconds, we would have to add that we do not mean it as a “Belgian joke” since they are used to it.

    And then, after 20 seconds, we would all wake up because this scenario is extremely dumb and unrealistic.

    Stop with the bullshit justifications Lavrov…

  16. The crazy thing is imagining any of those countries would do anything like what Russia is doing to Ukraine, like it’s some sort of gotcha exposing hypocrisy. I guess when you’re living in brutality and propaganda, you sort of assume it’s the norm and everyone would act like you do.

  20. I’m pretty sure France wouldn’t invade Belgium, bombard the shit out of us, commit atrocities, go on a rape spree and reward their soldiers for it.

    But nicely tried, Sergey.

  24. Since when has Russian being banned in Ukraine? Isn’t Russian even Zelensky’s mother tongue.

  25. I assume they would do exactly the same we would if Austria and Switzerland were to ban German… absolutely fucking nothing. The fact that he even remotely thinks places such as France or Sweden share their imperialistic views is simply mind boggling.

  27. „What about”.

    Thing is, this scenarios have like 0.01% chance to came to be.

    France are you deploying an army of 50k troops at a border of some weaker neighbour to denazify him and commit all kinds of war crimes? 😂 Hell no, right? Guess Belgium has no reason to ban France.

    Lavrov is a looney.

  29. France would definitely invade Belgium and start killing all the French-speaking people they claimed to want to protect.

  30. Well, this is remarkable and I really learned something here.

    In Germany we have many immigrants who hardly learn German. Even their kids have problems as they only speak Turkish at home. And in certain areas you can hear mainly Turkish during lunch break at schools.

    So many people were advocating to enforce that kids speak German in school and I think some schools even [enforced](https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/deutschpflicht-an-grundschule-eltern-wehren-sich-gegen-strafarbeit-fuer-drittklaesslerin-a-c235f4e0-e8f4-47a3-b890-b13b3275e23e) it.

    Of course this is an easy target for populists on both sides of the game with heated debates and blatant simplifications fly around.

    I was unsure if you could really drive this until war and genocide but here we are.

  31. I’m from Finnish-Swedish region. It is not unthinkable that in 50 years the status of Swedish language in Finland has to be examined. It all depends how the culture transforms. Specially in the eastern and central parts the idea seems silly, since there are zero Swedish speakers. I get it, i lived in the east too and it just is not part of their daily life. So, not unthinkable but not very current topic, really..

    One thing that creates friction is the requirement to learn Swedish in school, since a LOT of people never use it. We kind of pretend that the 5% that speak Swedish are 50%, official documents etc have to be translated, government officials often have to know Swedish even without a single time using it in their career.. There are downsides but then again, for a lot of people it is their mother language.

    My stance on language is that the most important thing is that we all understand each other, everything else is secondary.

  34. Yes. You bag of shit. We would immediately attach those countries without hesitation. Lie about not attacking then bomb all the hospitals, schools, breadlines, refugees, monuments, then rape everything that couldn’t run away. Then steal all the toilets, nutella and xboxin a 50km range.
    What a fucking asshole!

  35. they think like criminals.

    “What would you do if your neighbour disrespected you? Would you sit there and take it or would you glass him down the pub? exactly.”

  36. Nothing.

    But that doesn’t even matter because you SHOULDN’T GO AROUND INVADING OTHER COUNTRIES AND THEN GENOCIDE THE POPULATION…. But nice try.

  37. Well, I don’t know where is this comparison coming from. Ukraine doesn’t ban Russian, it protects Ukrainian. You can still buy books and newspapers in Russian, and you can easily find Russian on TV. This year I watched a New Year’s concert on a Ukrainian TV channel that was totally in Russian with only one Ukrainian song.

  38. write an angry worded letter? at any rate, ukraine did not ban Russian. Lavrov is clutching at straws to justify this thing to himself. otherwise he will end up institutionalized.

  39. If Ireland declared Irish to be the only official language … England would literally not give a shit. Probably some whining from the Daily Mail. Certainly not invasion.

  42. This is the tactics they use: everyone discusses what would France do, and not the fact that Russian is not banned in Ukraine.

Leave a Reply