Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's opening remarks during talks with Minister of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation and Moroccan Expatriates of the Kingdom of Morocco Nasser Bourita, Moscow, October 16, 2025
16 October 2025 13:48
1708-16-10-2025
15 October 2025 22:20
Statement by Head of the Russian Delegation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control Yulia Zhdanova at the 1117th Plenary Meeting of the OSCE Forum for Security Cooperation, October 15, 2025
1705-15-10-2025
Agenda item: Security Dialogue
Theme: Resilience through Comprehensive Security
Mr Chairperson,
When the Finnish Chairpersonship organised the Security Dialogue to discuss how resilience helps societies adapt to military threats, the assumption was that the Finnish representatives would use their chairmanship status to present this subject in the interests of all the 57 member states without exception. However, the analytical materials you have circulated before the meeting, and statements by some invited speakers clearly focused on appeals to the trans-Atlantic political elites to strengthen control of the civilian population and spreading anti-Russia sentiments across societies with the aim of preparing them for an armed confrontation with the Russian Federation. These actions are discrediting and undermining the prestige of the OSCE, which has until recently been the only regional platform for multilateral democracy. At some moments during the meeting, it seemed that we were attending a NATO conference held to discuss measures against our country. If this is how you planned to strengthen trust on this platform, as you claimed, your attempt has failed.
Considering the essence of some previous statements, we would like to provide an open and honest answer regarding our views on how our opponents are trying to build up "resilience."
What some speakers said is fully in keeping with the idea German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach has put forth in his book The Essence of Christianity: "But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, (...)in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness." This is the essence of the multifaceted confrontation launched by the "collective West" against the Russian Federation and other rogue countries.
At this time, national and collective resilience west of Vienna is above all viewed through the prism of "Russian threat." A massive campaign is gathering momentum to prepare European peoples for a direct military confrontation with our country. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has said that "Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years." They see cyberattacks, disinformation, propaganda and crowd manipulation everywhere. No proof has been provided for any of the accusations against us. When it turns out that Russia was not to blame, nobody thinks of apologising for the lies and slander. Yet preparations for crisis situations are based on these imaginary threats.
Europeans are being deliberately misled and indoctrinated to prevent people from taking a critical look at the EU and NATO's policy of militarising the continent and increasing military spending to the detriment of solving socioeconomic problems. They are actively working with industrial enterprises, including private ones, to make them accept the possibility of the expropriation of their assets for military purposes.
It is vital to see that fake news, which has been put on the pedestal in the EU and NATO countries and spread by the social networks and media they control, is having a destructive effect on social conscience and behaviour. People are encouraged to believe that fake stories are an exclusively external threat coming from non-Western countries. Some strategic documents published in NATO countries define disinformation as "information which fits with existing pro-Kremlin narratives, aims or activities." In other words, disinformation can be anything that does not suit NATO or can potentially erect obstacles to spreading pro-Western narratives, regardless of the truth.
The alliance itself can hardly see itself as a giver of truth. It has a long history of hybrid operations and has many times discredited itself by spreading false information about its own conduct and the actions of others. We have seen the obvious signs of military intimidation, covert interference, the supply of arms and military equipment, economic blackmail, diplomatic duplicity, manipulation of the media and open disinformation in Yugoslavia in 1999 and Libya in 2011.
This pre-configured virtual reality, into which European societies are immersed, is not only shaped through the introduction of the notion of radical liberal values but also through Russophobia, the rewriting of history, and cancel culture. A thing worthy of note is the phenomenon of post-nationalism, which is, as political analyst Alexander Sosnovsky has aptly put it, a bright example of the distorted theory of democracy when a society is created in the total absence of the freedom of speech.
In the West, information space has been cleansed of any alternative opinions. Attempts by individual politicians and active citizens to criticise the authorities quickly lead to their stigmatisation. They have banned a number of Russian media outlets and blocked access to many Russian information resources. This is part of Western reality where military resilience of states is being reinforced through total disinformation of the population.
The global information space and the introduction of AI technology offer unlimited opportunities to Western intelligence services to use various elements of social engineering to purposefully influence public consciousness as a whole. The Euro-Atlantic elites are doing this to create controlled chaos, which they are using to destabilise the key regions of the world by setting "disobedient" states against each other with the aim of creating Western-controlled operational and tactical coalitions around them.
We could see this scenario enacted in Ukraine, where the West worked for decades to build up anti-Russia forces through the networks it controls. And then the criminal regime, which it brought to power through a bloody state coup in February 2014, launched a civil war, outlawed Russian speaking citizens, hushed up bloody crimes committed in Kiev, Odessa, Donbass and other places, and has started restricting the rights of national minorities and the freedom of religion. For over a decade, the "collective West" has not only turned a blind eye to the crimes committed by the Kiev regime but also financed, armed and actually controlled it. The civilian casualties caused in the Russian territory by the Ukrainians using NATO-supplied weapons are considered justifiable.
The FSC frequently states that Russia "has not demonstrated any genuine openness to a just and lasting peace." We would like to remind colleagues that international humanitarian law - specifically, Article 37 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions - explicitly prohibits perfidy.
The signing of the Minsk Agreements, followed by years of high-level political statements intended to mislead the international community about the reasons for their non-implementation, constitutes a widely recognised and documented case of such perfidious action. This aligns with the prohibition against "feigning an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce." These deceptive statements were further amplified, utilising modern information and communications technologies to garner widespread support. We are therefore convinced that the deception employed by Germany, France, and Ukraine in concealing their true intentions regarding the Minsk Agreements must be further qualified within this legal framework.
Furthermore, in 2021, the Russian side presented draft treaties on security guarantees to the United States and NATO. For us, the core provisions included the non-expansion of NATO, the non-deployment of strike weapons systems near Russia's borders, and the return of the Alliance's military infrastructure to its 1997 positions. We remain confident that such measures would have ensured de-escalation. Regrettably, NATO demonstrated an unwillingness to engage in a serious dialogue to address our legitimate security concerns.
In this context, it is pertinent to recall recent admissions made in Kiev: the agreements reached in Istanbul in March 2022 between Russian and Ukrainian delegations for conflict resolution were intentionally torpedoed. The then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, reportedly influenced by external interests (a 1-million-pound personal donation from an arms magnate), effectively forbade his protégés in Kiev from continuing negotiations with Moscow.
This makes it clear that Western claims of supporting Ukraine's independence and peace are empty rhetoric. In reality, this post-Soviet republic is treated as a mere pawn on a geopolitical chessboard - an instrument of confrontation where its population is viewed as expendable material in a hybrid war against Russia.
Today, we see a concerted effort to present to your domestic audiences and the international community a narrative of a unified Ukrainian populace selflessly rallying against an alleged "aggressor." However, your citizens remain unaware - as it is conspicuously absent from media coverage - of the reality that territorial recruitment offices are conducting what can only be described as a widespread manhunt for Ukrainian men. These individuals are being beaten, rounded up from the streets of their own cities and towns, and forcibly dispatched to the front lines.
Furthermore, according to official data alone, there have been approximately 160,000 desertions from the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the beginning of this year. Many are so desperate to avoid dying for the senseless interests of the West that they are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be smuggled across the border. In light of this, what kind of social stability can we possibly speak of? And what, precisely, are these citizens being asked to fight for? For "their" land, which has in reality been largely sold off to transnational corporations? For a "democracy" that only works for corrupt officials, and a de facto military-police dictatorship for the rest?
We also observe that the proposed methods for building societal resilience extend to the indoctrination of minors. Russia has been falsely accused of nothing less than "erasing the identity" of Ukrainian children. But have your citizens been informed about the nationalist children's camps operating in Ukraine? In these camps, participants are not only subjected to intense psychological pressure but are also instructed in weapons handling and marksmanship. Some of these programmes are run by known radical groups such as the Stepan Bandera Trident, Azov, and Right Sector (all banned in Russia), with a specific focus on training their young cadets in the art of killing "Moskals" and "separatists."
You can easily find videos, readily accessible in the public domain, showing young children demonstrating how they will, in their own words, use knives to "slash Moskals." Do you want your own children be taught to kill from such a tender age?
In the context of today's discussion, it is important to note that while strengthening its resilience, the West is trying to undermine the resilience of other states.
We know very well about some NATO countries' coveted dream of orchestrating a "Russian maidan." Aware of the futility of that dream, they have been trying to undermine the resilience of the Russian people through large-scale provocations by proxy of Ukraine. During the AFU's incursion into the Kursk Region, the Kiev regime used a great deal of deep fakes imitating statements by local officials, including those created with the assistance of the Anglo-Saxon intelligence services. These fake statements reported the occupation of settlements, a new wave of mobilisation, and food and fuel shortages. Every possible method was used to spread panic among civilians. But they have not succeeded. The Russian people united against the common enemy. The invading forces were destroyed.
Mr Chairperson,
Despite major failures of their destructive course in the post-Soviet space, the West has not abandoned the practice of flagrantly interfering in the affairs of CIS countries in a bid to disunite them, destroy their political will and economic potential, and prevent the development of an alternative centre of power in Eurasia capable of challenging the waning Western hegemony. Having no power to act directly as they did in the past, by means of the so-called humanitarian interventions, the Western bloc is trying to undermine the existing authorities in the CIS by inciting ethnic separatism and xenophobia. The radical nationalist agenda goes together with the pro-Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese agenda.
The EU and NATO's attempts to "cancel" Russia have led to a growing landslide of socioeconomic problems and security risks. The level of public support for the leaders of the Western anti-Russia coalition has reached historic lows. At the same time, support for President Putin in our country, which you dream of bringing to its knees, remains consistently high. We have thrown out Napoleon's armies and marched into Paris. We have liberated Europe from German fascism. Today, we will cut short the vain efforts of the Ukrainian-Western coalition to "inflict a strategic defeat on Russia." Full responsibility for the consequences of their anti-Russia policies will fall on the EU and NATO elites.
While the "collective West" lacks maturity and courage to be on the right side of history, other nations - the Global Majority - are building their future. Working together with our friends in the EAEU, CIS, CSTO, SCO and BRICS, we will continue along the path of building a collective security architecture in Eurasia, which is not designed to prepare our societies for a war but to ensure their prosperity. I have no doubt that healthy forces in Western countries that are aware of risks to the international community will join this process increasingly more actively.
Thank you.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
