Russia responds to US over ‘big country bullying’
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has some nerve in accusing Moscow of the kind of behavior more often associated with Washington, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared on Friday.
Asked about the billions of dollars the US has funneled to Ukraine in a TV interview to CBS, Blinken said that “viscerally most Americans don’t like to see a big country bullying another, and they just feel it’s wrong and want to do something about it.”
Blinken further claimed that after the Second World War, the world agreed on “some basic rules, some basic principles like one country just can’t attack its neighbor, it can’t try to seize its land by force, can’t try to erase it from the map, can’t bully it,“ and accused Russia of doing just that with Ukraine.
Commenting on Blinken’s remarks, Zakharova said she thought a secretary of state would need to know his own country’s history, and offered the US official a refresher course.
“I could be mistaken, but I thought Blinken was representing the US, and not some other country,” the diplomat said on Telegram. “Was it not the US that attacked Iraq? Or was Iraq not small enough?” she added.
In addition to the 2003 invasion, based on the false claim that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction, Zakharova brought up nine other examples of US wars, starting with the 1846 invasion of Mexico and annexation of a third of its territory.
The US controls Guam and Puerto Rico to this day thanks to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Several “regime change” interventions in Latin America and the Vietnam War also made the list, as did the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and occupation of the Serbian province Kosovo, as well as the ongoing illegal occupation of a third of Syria, under the guise of fighting terrorism.
“The history of the United States, though short, is bloody and amounts to a country hostile to nations that do not obey its will,” Zakharova noted.
While the US and its allies – claiming to speak for the “international community” – accuse Russia of an “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine, Moscow has insisted that its actions amount to legitimate self-defense from aggression against both the Russian-speaking residents of Donbass and Russia itself.
