Statement
Statement summary
SERGEY V. LAVROV, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, said “in the contemporary history of the UN, many ambitious events concluded with loud declarations that were quickly forgotten about”, recalling, among other examples, the United States’ aggression against Iraq following the 2005 World Summit to “end all wars”. The adopted SDGs turned out to be “empty promises in light of the reluctance of the countries of the West to refrain from their neocolonial practices of mining the entire world for their benefit”. It is not too late to revive the UN, but it cannot occur through summits and declarations that are divorced from reality, “rather, it must be done through rebuilding confidence and trust based on the Charter principle of the sovereign equality of all Member States.” The West continues to undermine global trust through unilateral actions, bypassing the UN. Meanwhile, binding Security Council resolutions continue to go unimplemented. The most glaring example is 80 years of consensus on the establishment of a Palestinian State existing peacefully with Israel, scrapped entirely.
“Everyone who still has a sense of compassion is outraged” that the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks against Israelis are being used to collectively punish Palestinian civilians, he stressed, urging that their killing “with American weapons must immediately be ended”. Another glaring example of terrorism is the recent attacks in Lebanon, “transforming civilian technology into lethal weapons”, he said, calling for an immediately investigation. The evidence indicates Washington, D.C.’s, awareness in their orchestration, though they may deny it as they have denied their involvement in the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline — just another example of their interference in the same globalism that they promote. The UN Secretariat must act impartially and avoid playing into the hands of those who scupper cooperation and divide the world “into a flowering garden and the jungle — or those sitting around the table of democracy and those who are on the menu”, he said. Underscoring the track record of countries demanding compliance with their rules, such as the birth of ISIS following the aggression against Iraq, he called all countries to be wary in dealing with the inventors of those rules if they care about their own freedom, especially against a backdrop of an expanding NATO.
Next, warning Europe against following “Anglo-Saxon strategists” into the “suicidal escapade” of defeating his country using the “illegitimate Kyiv neo-Nazi regime”, he said that it is just as senseless to fight with a nuclear Power as it is for Kyiv’s Western backers insisting that there is no alternative to negotiations aside from their “Peace Formula”. Though obsessed with human rights, Western leaders are silent about Kyiv’s racist actions, he said, spotlighting the extermination of Russian culture and language in Ukraine. These are the reasons for his country’s military intervention, he said, and unless they are addressed, peace will not be achievable. “Confrontation and hegemony will not resolve any global problem, they will hold back the objective process of the formation of a multipolar world order that will be based on the equal rights of large and small nations”, respecting human identity equality between men and women and the right of peoples to determine their own fate — all language enshrined in the UN Charter. “Addressing the most complex problems facing all of humanity is something we can only do together taking into account one another’s interestb” and the Global South and the East are speaking up for their rights to decision-making on a global scale, both through many regional organisations and the BRICS [Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa] association, which promotes mutually beneficial development, free from the control of dictates.
Ukraine’s hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield is senseless given that Moscow holds nuclear weapons and any effort by the NATO alliance to keep aiding Kyiv will prove to be a “suicidal escapade”, Russia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs told the UN General Assembly on Saturday.
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Sergey Lavrov said criticism of Russia’s “special operation” based on the UN Charter and Ukraine’s territorial integrity, ignored the fact that the UN’s founding document also “declares the obligation to respect the principles of the equality and self-determination of peoples”, he said, arguing that this had after all been the basis for ongoing decolonisation efforts.
“The rights of Russians and those that feel they are part of Russian culture following the coup d’etat in Kyiv have methodically been exterminated,” he declared, and this poses a threat to Russian and wider European security.
Mr. Lavrov said President Vladimir Putin had a “realistic settlement plan” and was prepared to negotiate, blaming the West for sabotaging previous attempts.
He said the attempt by the Washington-London-Brussels axis to defeat Russia was nullifying the UN’s attempts to enhance global cooperation through agreements such as Sunday’s Pact for the Future – which Russia refused to back – and was “blocking the functioning of the entire system of global governance, including the Security Council.”
“That’s not something we chose and we’re not responsible for the consequences of this dangerous course,” he added.
He accused the West of “steadily destroying the model of globalisation that they themselves created”, warning that other regions of the world were forging their own alliances, inviting all of Europe and Asia to join a “single Eurasian space” separate from Washington’s influence.
Addressing the Middle East crisis, Mr. Lavrov said there was no justification for the terror attacks by Hamas and others of 7 October but the “mass collective punishment” of Palestinians since then had created an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.”
He bemoaned the rise of “the now almost commonplace practice of political killings” and noted the reported killing of a Hezbollah leader on Friday in Beirut.
“Security can be either equal and indivisible for all, or it won’t be for anyone”, he told delegates, returning to the theme of NATO’s “exceptionalism and impunity”.
The Russian Foreign Minister said the UN itself needed to be more even-handed in investigating “terrorist methods” used by Israel, the US and others, such as during the wireless device attacks in Lebanon last week.
Moreover, the UN needed to “avoid the temptation to play into the hands of individual States, particularly those that are actively calling not for cooperation but to divide the world into the flowering garden and the jungle – or to those sitting around the table of democracy, and those that are on the menu.”
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