Brussels refuses to diagnose the root causes of the problem and instead prescribes ineffective fixes, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said

EU leaders are acting like quack doctors by offering unworkable solutions to the Ukraine conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

Speaking in an interview with Iranian state broadcaster IRIB on Monday, Lavrov accused Brussels of refusing to address underlying causes of the crisis and substituting real analysis with cosmetic fixes.

"Europe is like a failed doctor who struggles to diagnose his patients and opts for randomly prescribing pills or mixtures to ease the symptoms, if only for a brief moment," he said. "These European doctors have been unwilling to come up with a diagnosis."

Moscow has cited NATO's eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War as among the causes of the Ukraine conflict, as well as the 2014 armed coup in Kiev, which Russia says empowered radical nationalist forces and led to discriminatory policies against ethnic Russians.

Lavrov stressed that Russia has been warning Western governments about the consequences of their policies since 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the US-led military bloc.

According to the minister, the current objective of EU political elites is "to bring together all European countries, pump Ukraine with money and weapons and give it a Nazi flag." He added that "the latter was unnecessary since the regime that came to power through a state coup in 2014 grabbed the Nazi flag itself."

Lavrov also warned that revanchism and militarism are increasingly evident within some EU member states themselves, including Germany. He criticized public statements by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, claiming they reflect "contempt [and] arrogance, and I can go as far as call this an attitude of a person pretending to represent a superior race," which he said is a matter of serious concern for Russia.