Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said today that the West’s attempts to isolate Russia are a “fiasco.” In an appearance at the Federation Council – the country’s Senate – he stressed that the “blitzkrieg of sanctions” against the Russian economy has also failed.
According to Lavrov, the cause of many of the negative processes taking place in the world is the “insatiable desire” of the United States and other countries to “impose their vision on everything.” That is why “in the face of the failure of the counteroffensive by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the United States has included a new mantra: not to let President Putin win in Ukraine,” the minister denounced. For Lavrov the essence of the “approaches” of the United States does not change: “Forcing its clients in kyiv to die, and to die for the interests of its masters abroad,” trying to undermine Russia’s power. He also said the West has concentrated its “most important anti-Russian energy” on destroying ties between Moscow and its neighbors, the former republics of the USSR.
Lavrov has proclaimed in recent days that 500 years of Western global dominance “are coming to an end.” He believes that the West is trying to exhaust Russia in Ukraine and that if peace talks were to take place then Kiev would have to change its own presidential decree, because a year and a half ago it signed a decree prohibiting any negotiations with the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Moscow speaks in a more emboldened tone these days, as Ukraine struggles to advance in the south, hold out in the east and secure more military aid from the West. This week Putin said that Ukraine and its allies “have no future, and we do.” Lavrov has spoken these days about an eventual negotiation in the face of the apparent stagnation of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. He noted that “it is up to the Ukrainians to recognize how deep they are in the hole that the Americans put them in,” in this war. The head of Russian diplomacy regretted that “the West has ignored everything that happened in Ukraine before February 2022.” “I am not a hypocrite, and neither is Russia,” he stressed.
Lavrov is convinced that Russia “has become stronger due to the conflict in Ukraine, just as it has become stronger by defeating Napoleon and Hitler.” And the “hybrid war of the West against Russia”, based on the “cancellation of Russian culture”, can do nothing against this.
Asked if Russia wants Trump to win the US elections, Lavrov said he would not like to “get into this” because “their elections are their business.”
He also talked about the Middle East. He insisted that it is not acceptable for Israel to use the Hamas attack of October 7 as justification for the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. And he called for international oversight on the ground in Gaza. President Putin has repeatedly blamed the war between Israel and Hamas on the failure of years of American diplomacy: “We have told Israel for many years that the most dangerous factor in the Middle East is the unresolved status of the Palestinian state.”
This Wednesday, Lavrov demanded that the United Nations hold an international conference to find a way to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “forever.” “The only way to solve this problem fairly and forever is to hold an international conference in which, of course, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council participate: the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom. “said the Russian minister.
Lavrov’s call came a day after the UN General Assembly approved a new resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and days after the United States vetoed a draft resolution before the UN Security Council. UN to demand a ceasefire in Gaza after Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, thus warning of the situation in the Middle East.
At the same time, Lavrov stressed that “Russian-Chinese relations of global partnership and strategic interaction are experiencing the best moment in their history.” The harmony between Moscow and Beijing in foreign policy, he added, “plays an increasingly stabilizing role in the international arena.”
