Bizarroworld is bigger than we knew They didn’t start the fire? Comments by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, were met with laughter at an international conference in India, when he said that the Ukraine war had been “launched against” his home country. Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue, a politics and economics event in Delhi, Lavrov also claimed that Russia was trying to stop the war. “The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” he said, briefly stumbling over his words as people in the audience laughed. Lavrov continued: “And the blunt way to describe what changed: we would not any more rely on any partners in the west. We would not allow them to blow the pipelines again,” in a reference to the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea in September. Contrary to Lavrov’s claim, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched an invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year, in what he called a “special military operation”. Right. He went on to question America’s war in Iraq and he’s got a point. The US can’t claim a whole lot of moral superiority on this topic. On the other hand, at least Iraq wasn’t a peaceful democracy, so there is a tiny bit of daylight there.