Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's opening remarks at a meeting with the heads of Russian foreign policy non-profit organisations, Moscow, July 22, 2022
22 July 2022 16:04
1522-22-07-2022
Good afternoon, colleagues.
I am delighted with the opportunity to resume in-person meetings between our ministry and foreign policy non-governmental organisations (NGOs) after the pandemic-related pause. It is important to hear civil society's up-to-the-minute position, breath and mood. President Vladimir Putin has mentioned this more than once in covering Russia's actions in depth amid the ongoing developments in Ukraine and made clear the reasons for us being forced to launch the special military operation, which capped our country's 30-year-long efforts to ensure our own security through talks and agreements that would be legally binding and guarantee equal and indivisible security in our common European space.
The term "equal and indivisible security" has been repeatedly approved by the OSCE at the top political level, including during the OSCE summit that was held in Kazakhstan in 2010. This formula implies an extra clause that no country or organisation in Europe can try to dominate this geopolitical space.
NATO has basically been doing the opposite since then. Contrary to the promises it made to the new Russian leadership in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union was in the process of disintegrating, this bloc saw five waves of expansion. Even then we tried to look for constructive solutions. In 1997, our leaders agreed to sign, with NATO, the Founding Act, under which Moscow, in fact, accepted NATO's eastward expansion as a matter of course, but the document stated that the key outcome of the talks was the fact that the alliance would undertake not to deploy substantial permanent combat forces on the territories of its new members.
We breathed a sigh of relief, but it turned out that NATO didn't really mean it and was just giving us the runaround. They regularly conducted an increasing number of large-scale exercises. We pointed out NATO's commitment to not deploy substantial permanent combat forces on the territories of its new members. We were told that they (the contingents), first, were "not permanent," and second, "not substantial." I'm serious, that's exactly what these "adults" told us.
In 2009, we proposed an agreement on the definition of what "substantial combat force" meant and suggested a specific proposal that it be a brigade armed with a certain number of specific weapons. NATO shrugged this conversation off. This once again showed their real attitude towards the prospects for ensuring security in Europe.
Closer to 2010, we said that if fulfilling a political agreement not to strengthen one's security at the expense of others is impossible (perhaps political mantras are not enough), then we should make a treaty out of it, codify it, and make this statement legally binding. Upon reflection, they told us they would continue to adopt joint political declarations at the OSCE, and legal security guarantees could be provided exclusively to members of the alliance. This was the patent undermining of their own commitments signed by their presidents and prime ministers, which were used to try to paint a "rosy picture" in relations between us and the situation in the OSCE in general.
NATO's continuing buildup and eastward expansion spread to the post-Soviet states. Ukraine was courted more than the others. It was supplied with arms; its Russophobic and nationalist attitudes were encouraged in every way. Its neo-Nazism was ignored, and its roots, that existed for a long time, were nurtured. When Ukraine became a scene of alarming events (the first Maidan in 2004 and the second later), all high-flown Western statements about the need for us to be guided by universal values and create a common space from the Atlantic to the Pacific were left in the past. The West made direct demands on the eve of election campaigns there: the Ukrainians had to decide who they were with - Europe, the West or with the Russian Federation. These demands were made by officials - foreign ministers and representatives of the European Commission. They exposed the real value of the concept for a common space and a common destiny for humanity.
In 2013, Ukraine just asked to delay the decision on legalising the Association Agreement with the European Union. It asked the EU to give it time to understand what consequences signing it might have for trade within the CIS. Ukraine wanted to look at just the economic aspect of the issue. It had a free trade agreement with the Russian Federation and wanted to have a similar agreement with the EU, under which all tariffs would simply disappear on this vast space. Meanwhile, Russia had serious tariff barriers with the EU, agreed to during negotiations for accession to the WTO.
We explained to Kiev that if Ukraine had zero tariffs with the EU like it had with us, the EU would flood our territory with its goods without any protection. In this case we would have to create customs at the border with Ukraine to stop the unimpeded flow of goods there. All this was related only to the economic implications that Ukraine, under President Yanukovich, wanted to weigh and analyse. This indecision was interpreted in the wrong way, leading to Maidan protests that were followed later by a coup. The coup took place the morning after France, Germany and Poland guaranteed, with the signatures of their foreign ministers, the agreements on a peaceful settlement of differences between the opposition forces and Viktor Yanukovich. The opposition trampled them underfoot. It spit (excuse the rude word, but this is what happened) on the EU signatures, demanded that the Russian language be deprived of its regional status and that Russians be thrown out of Crimea. Then it sent its militants to assault the Supreme Council in the Republic of Crimea.
Reluctant to live under such neo-Nazi leaders, Crimea naturally held a referendum. The east of Ukraine announced that it did not want to have anything in common with these leaders. An "anti-terrorist operation" was launched against the residents of Ukraine's eastern regions, which had not attacked anyone. Hostilities were stopped with great difficulty in February 2015. The Minsk agreements, providing for a direct dialogue between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk, were signed. It was necessary to resolve many issues, but nobody stirred a finger to do it.
Petr Poroshenko said recently that he signed the Minsk agreements with no intention of fulfilling them. Why did he do this? He concluded them only to gain time and receive more weapons from the West. This is how cynical he was. During all these years, Germany and France were trying to protect Kiev, the regimes of Poroshenko and Zelensky by saying, "It is necessary to understand them, they are in a difficult position, a direct dialogue is impossible, so let Russia decide something for them instead of Donetsk and Lugansk." In the meantime, these countries were dodging their own commitments as the guarantors of the Minsk agreements, something they assumed together with us. So when a couple of weeks ago, Poroshenko put his cards on the table, did they say anything about it? Perhaps that he had cheated them, that this was dishonourable, that he behaved badly? No, they said nothing at all.
President Zelensky was not planning on fulfilling the Minsk agreements either, since they had already buried them. In a fit of a Russophobic rage, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is demanding that Ukraine not stop the hostilities and not start talks until a victory is won, and from Russia, reach an agreement, and sign a treaty that guarantees sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Olaf Scholz is way too late. The Minsk agreements were a treaty that guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity and granted a special, but rather straightforward status to Donbass. I'm not sure what the problem was with implementing it. It was about the right to speak the Russian language and have the local police and the right to coordinate the candidacies of judges and prosecutors, as well as special easy-term economic ties with neighbouring Russian regions. There was nothing special about it. The Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina has the same rights and powers in its relations with Serbia.
It turned out that the two chains of events converged. The first one is uncurbed NATO eastward expansion, which had become very targeted in recent years as it sought to absorb Ukraine and create a foothold on its territory that would be flooded with weapons and would be used (as they like to put it) to "contain" the Russian Federation. The concurrent process is making Ukraine a dependent Russophobic state, regardless even of NATO's plans. What's the point of adopting a series of laws banning the Russian language in education, the media and culture otherwise? They closed down opposition-operated Russian and Ukrainian media outlets that broadcast in Russian. They created quasi-channels that spewed glaring propaganda in the Russian language, a stunt that the Kiev regime is pulling in the international arena regularly several times a day.
At the same time, these neo-Nazi "sprouts" have grown into strong shoots. The West simply refuses to see the nationalist battalions and all those tattooed fighters who are shown on television. Every time I can, I have the following to say to the ambassadors of the (primarily Western) foreign states working in Moscow, "Your countries have blocked alternative sources of information, our news channels that delivered news to your citizens, but you are here in the Russian Federation and you see that our television and social media broadcast, among other things, what the Ukrainians or the West have to say. We are showing the truth with our correspondents working on the ground, around the clock, and interviewing the people who lived under the Kiev regime for many years." We are wondering if these ambassadors ever report this to their respective capitals. They make it clear that they do report these things (I'd be hard pressed to believe that an ambassador does not report to the capital the developments in the country of his residence and that country's actions in the foreign policy arena). If so, the West's foreign ministries that do receive this information are thus assuming an additional major responsibility for concealing the truth, which runs counter to every Western value in the book.
This is not really about Ukraine and not even about NATO expansion, as President of Russia Vladimir Putin has said more than once. This is much more of a global story. The West does not want to deal with anyone on an equal footing. It wants to deal only with those that are absolutely obedient to it. Anyone else will be punished until they play nice and start following "the party line" as we used to say. This is exactly why the West does not talk about international law. It has invented a new term - "a rules-based order." The West talks about this all the time, trying to introduce it into any international discussion or document, openly implying that they will determine what rules should be applied in a given case. They have already announced that WTO reform will be coordinated only between America and Europe. The PRC will not have access to this - like we'll explain to China how it will have to take part in the international division of labour. The irrepressible striving to dominate and not to share authority can also be seen at the IMF and the World Bank. Real life compels to act a little more delicately, pragmatically and farsightedly. Thus, in purchasing power parity, the BRICS countries have already matched and even exceeded current G7 levels.
The West is furiously introducing anti-Russia sanctions, seeing our country as the main barrier to its total domination, an obstacle to attempts to impose its own agenda on everyone in international security, the economy, trade and even culture. This reflects what the West currently has at stake - a theme we discussed in the beginning, a theme we discussed in the OSCE 20 years ago. At that time, the discussion ended with an agreement that not a single organisation in Europe had the right to claim a dominant position. Meanwhile, the West has been doing this exact thing for a long time. Moreover, the last NATO summit in Madrid declared the inseparable link between ensuring security in the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. This was a signal to our Chinese neighbours and friends - we have interests in this region of the world as well. When bombing Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, the United States declared these countries a threat to their interests - a threat that is 10,000 kilometers away, across the Atlantic. They did this very simply - gave a statement one day and started a war the next day.
For many years, we have been trying to prevent a situation (I mentioned our diplomatic and practical efforts) where Ukraine becomes an enemy of the Russian Federation. We made several attempts to reach agreements by signing legally binding documents on how to build security in Europe without letting anyone feel insecure. But traditionally, continuously, systematically they refused to listen to us. Now that we are removing this threat, emanating not from the other side of the world, over the North Pole, but the threat that the West has been creating at our borders for many years (this is not a double standard but a disgusting manifestation of hegemony and neocolonialism), we are being accused of what you can see for yourselves. Any term will fit here.
None of this is an exaggeration, like the humour magazine Crocodile of Soviet times. This is a true phenomenon that the West now embodies.
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