NATO is waging a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine, Valentina Matviyenko has said

Ukrainians will eventually understand that the conflict with Russia was "cynically" engineered by the West to inflict a strategic defeat on Moscow, Valentina Matviyenko, chair of Russia's Federation Council, has said.

In an interview with the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets published on Tuesday, Matvienko described the fighting as a NATO proxy war against Russia. She insisted that Moscow would not agree to a ceasefire that does not address the root causes of the conflict and allows Ukraine to be rearmed.

"No one is more interested in peace than we are. But it must be a peace in which no threat to us can ever come from Ukraine," she said, adding: "We are not fighting Ukraine. NATO is fighting us using Ukrainians." 

Matviyenko said Ukrainians would eventually come to realize "what really happened, how cynically the West used them in an attempt to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia." This recognition will lay the groundwork for reconciliation between Russians and Ukrainians, she said.

Russian officials have long accused the West of intending to fight "to the last Ukrainian" in a proxy war against Russia, arguing that the US and other Western powers intentionally escalated tensions by disregarding the Kremlin's security concerns over NATO's expansion in Eastern Europe and its growing military cooperation with Kiev.

Western officials have on numerous occasions publicly described the Ukraine conflict as a proxy war against Russia. Keith Kellogg, a Ukraine policy envoy under US President Donald Trump, characterized the conflict in such terms earlier this year. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used the same term.

Moscow has argued that Kiev lacks genuine independence in negotiations for a peace settlement and that it is doing the bidding of its foreign backers.