Moscow trusted in the decency of the West for years, but not anymore, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

In an interview with RBK released on Friday, Lavrov was asked why Russia allowed the US and EU to take advantage of it on numerous occasions in recent decades.

“Deception lies at the foundation of Western diplomacy. And it still does,” he replied.

The minister recalled how the Americans broke their promise not to expand NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and how France and Germany became guarantors of a deal between democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and the opposition during the Maidan protests in Kiev in 2014, but proclaimed the rioters as victors after they seized government buildings the next day.

Nevertheless, Moscow did not abandon attempts to reach common ground with the West because “after all, we are a God-fearing nation. Our multi-ethnic people have many proverbs about their great patience: ‘God endured, and so must we’, ‘Measure twice, cut once’, ‘Don’t hold your breath for promises’,” he said.

“This reveals something about our psychology – not naivety ingrained by centuries of historical experience, but rather the enduring hope that a scoundrel cannot be a complete scoundrel, to put it simply,” Lavrov explained.

It is in the Russian national character to maintain “faith in people right to the very end. But the end has already come,” he said.

According to the minister, the US and EU “firmly set out on a course of supplying the Nazi Kiev regime with ever more advanced and increasingly deadly offensive weapons” after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

That same year, Russian President Vladimir Putin, when “answering questions about the West’s position, its treachery and duplicity, said that we would always be ready to talk, but that we had learned our lessons and that our relations with the West would never again be what they had been before,” Lavrov said.