Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera scandalously refused to publish in full the exclusive written interview with Sergey Lavrov that the Russian Foreign Ministry offered them in order to clarify Russia’s positions and with which they were eager to cooperate until they received the answers from him. 

The Russian Foreign Ministry then condemned their decision as “a blatant case of censorship.”

What follows are highlights from his interview so that readers can make up their own minds about it.

Lavrov began by relating how Trump agreed with Putin in Anchorage that Ukraine should be kept out of NATO and that the new ground reality should be recognized

Ukraine, the EU, and the UK immediately tried to manipulate him right after during their White House meeting. The Financial Times then played a complementary role after the next Trump-Putin call in October by speculating that Lavrov’s follow-up call with Rubio ruined their Budapest Summit plans. Putin is still ready to meet with Trump there though.

The next point that Lavrov made was that the special operation isn’t about territory but saving the Russian minority’s lives and ensuring his country’s security.

The restraint that Russia has exercised thus far is to spare civilian and military lives. He also reaffirmed Russia’s goals in the special operation and defended wearing a sweatshirt with USSR written on the front during the Anchorage Summit, which he said doesn’t imply a desire to recreate the Soviet Union and was just a display of patriotism.

Moving along, Lavrov said that the Europeans want to indefinitely perpetuate the Ukrainian Conflict because “they have no other way of distracting their voters from sharply deteriorating domestic socioeconomic problems…they are openly preparing Europe for a new big war against Russia and are trying to talk Washington into rejecting an honest and fair settlement.”

He then referenced Russia’s pre-2022 proposal for reforming the European security architecture, which NATO and the EU rejected.

When asked about Russia’s “isolation”, he listed Russia’s wide array of partners across the Global South and some of the high-level events in which his fellow diplomats participated, while dismissing the interviewer’s suggestion that Russia is in an alliance with China and dependent on it. He clarified that they coordinate their positions on key issues and regard one another as equals. Lavrov then ended by saying that a Russian-Italian rapprochement is only possible if Rome abandons its hostile policies.

Lavrov did indeed inject some predictable polemics into his answers, which is his style as anyone who follows him knows, but those aren’t legitimate grounds not to publish his interview. Corriere della Sera has the right to withhold publication of whatever it wants or only release an edited version, but their decision not to publish this interview in full reeks of censorship carried out on the pretext of their editorial standards. They probably didn’t want folks to read his polemics against Ukraine and the West.

In any case, all that they did was inadvertently draw more attention to the same polemics that they presumably wanted to censor after the Russian Foreign Ministry shined a spotlight on this scandal. Corriere della Sera is considered one of Europe’s newspapers of record so this reflects very poorly on them and the continent’s journalism industry as a whole. That’s not surprising for astute observers, but it might make an impression among casual ones who naively assumed that censorship doesn’t exist there.