Lavrov’s speech in the Convey Duma of the Russian Federation | Russia, Ukraine, NATO, United States

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the RussianFederation, Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov. Let's welcome Sergey Viktorovich. Dear Vyacheslav Viktorovich, dear colleagues. I am grateful for another opportunity to addressthe deputies of the State Duma during the traditional government hours. Interaction between the Ministry of ForeignAffairs and the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation is truly comradely. Our regular meetings in various formats makeit possible not only to provide legislators with information about the work of the ForeignService, but also to learn about your plans,.

Hear your advice and tips. This is especially important for us at thecurrent historical stage, when efforts to create favorable external conditions for solvingour internal socio-economic tasks and improving the well-being of our citizens are encounteringfierce resistance from those who imagine themselves to be the arbiters of the destinies of peoples. They are trying to prevent us by throwingus back decades, and in general, to disrupt the development of the country under the slogansof decolonization and preparations for the collapse of Russia. At the same time, the Anglo-Saxons and therest of the collective West, unquestioningly.

Subordinate to them, seek to impose theirdictate in world affairs at any cost in order to continue to control the external conditionsfor the development of all mankind for the sake of their own domination throughout theworld, resorting to illegal methods of threats, blackmail and outright theft, to punish thosewho pursue their own nationally oriented foreign policy. Therefore, in our updated Foreign Policy Concept,we will talk about the need to end the West’s monopoly on the formation of the frameworkof international life, which should henceforth be determined not in its selfish interests,but on a fair and universal basis of a balance of interests, as required by the UN Charter,which enshrined the principle of sovereign.

Equality of all states. Grossly violating this fundamental principleof civilized interstate communication, the United States and its allies are obsessedwith a maniacal desire to revive the neo-colonial unipolar world order, to interfere with theobjective process of the formation and rise of new world centers. All this is in their hope to continue, asPresident Putin said, speaking in the Kremlin on September 30 last year, to collect a realtribute from humanity, to extract the rent of the hegemon. This quote.

An integral part of this course is the long-termcontainment of Russia, including through the expansion of NATO in the direction of ourborders, as well as the transformation of fraternal Ukraine into anti-Russia, into aRussophobic military foothold. In recent years, this line of Washington andits European satellites has reached the point of no return. We have long had no illusions about the trueintentions of the West. We remembered how they failed to fulfill theconcrete political obligations they had given to the Soviet leadership to not expand theNorth Atlantic Alliance. How Germany, France and Poland, having refusedtheir signatures under the agreement between.

The President of Ukraine Yanukovych and theopposition, actually sanctioned the bloody coup d'etat in Kiev in February 2014 underopenly Nazi, racist slogans. All these years, Western curators have beendirectly pushing the criminal Kiev regime towards a forceful solution to the Donbassproblem, turning a blind eye to the inevitable large-scale ethnic cleansing and physicalextermination of Russian and Russian-speaking people. What are the recent cynical confessions ofthe former leaders of Germany and France, Merkel and Hollande, that they needed theMinsk Package of Measures, approved by the UN Security Council, only to buy time andallow Kiev to build up its military potential.

Poroshenko spoke in the same vein, followedby Zelensky. The well-known public confessions of thesecharacters signify their confession for the disruption of the Minsk agreements, whichwere proclaimed by all Western leaders as an uncontested basis for a settlement in theDonbass. To put it simply, everyone lied to us, asthey lie now, hiding the truth about the terrorist attacks on the Nord Streams. The other day, NATO Secretary General Stoltenbergjoined the chorus of confessions. He said in Brussels that the war began in2014. NATO members have been preparing it sincethe coup d'etat and the Nazis came to power.

In Kyiv with promises to destroy everythingRussian in Ukraine and expel Russians from Crimea. In other words, in order to resolve the Russianissue, NATO supported this, no matter how the descendants of the authors of previousattempts tried to refute it. Nevertheless, we did everything possible tothe last to reduce tension, to search for an equitable, mutually respectful agreement. It was for these purposes that President Putinin December 2021 put forward an initiative to draw up counter legally binding securityguarantees in the western direction. They are known to have been arrogantly rejectedby Washington and the North Atlantic bloc.

They did not even want to discuss our legitimateconcerns. All this left us with no other choice, whena year ago, on the orders of the Zelensky regime, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, led bynationalist battalions, switched to the violent suppression of Donbass, increasing the bombardmentof its settlements several times over. In response to the official request from theDPR and LPR, we recognized their independence and came to their aid in accordance with Article51 of the UN Charter by launching a special military operation. Today, the United States and its satellitesare carrying out an all-encompassing hybrid war against us, which has been preparing formany years, using Ukrainian national radicals.

As a battering ram. The purpose of this war is not hidden by them,it is not only to defeat our country on the battlefield, to destroy the Russian economy,but also to surround us with a cordon sanitaire, turn us into a kind of outcast country. Their range of tools is also wide, from directmilitary support to neo-Nazis, which just yesterday US Secretary of Defense Austin calledfor, stating the need to provide Ukraine with high-precision weapons and train its personnelin order to ensure the success of the regime’s new counter-offensive operations, which areallegedly being prepared, to unprecedented illegal sanctions and outright lies in anattempt to demonize Russia.

It got to the point that the official representativeof the French Foreign Ministry accused us earlier this month of pursuing, I quote, aneo-colonial policy in Africa. That is, Paris, which, together with otherEuro-grands, has committed numerous bloody crimes on the continent and today openly considersAfrica as its backyard, is making accusations against Moscow, which played a decisive rolein liberating the peoples of the continent from colonial oppression, in promoting theformation of their statehood, creation of the foundations of the economy and defensecapability. This is a clinical case. As we say, from a sick head to a healthy one.

Comments are unnecessary here. Their attempts to isolate Russia failed. Our enemies are also forced to admit this. The foreign policy course approved by ourPresident for the firm defense of national interests while being open to broad equalinternational cooperation is proving its effectiveness. In our long-term planning, we consistentlyproceed from the fact that the modern world is multipolar, that the countries of the Asia-Pacificregion, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, which make up the world's majority, let'snot forget about it, they do not want to live in a West-centric order based on rules inventedby the West.

These are the rules that Washington, Londonand Brussels have created and are creating each time in a new way, for themselves. Therefore, it is natural that three-quartersof the world's states did not join the anti-Russian sanctions. They have taken a balanced position on thesituation in Ukraine, which they rightly view not in isolation, but in the context of aEuropean security crisis that has long matured due to NATO's aggressive course as a whole. As the leader of the People's Republic ofChina stressed, we need to ensure the indivisibility of security on a global scale.

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