Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's opening remarks at a meeting of the Board of Trustees of Alexander Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund, Moscow, March 24, 2025
24 March 2025 15:35
455-24-03-2025
Mr Drachevsky,
Colleagues,
Friends,
Welcome to the latest meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Alexander Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund.
I'd like to begin by congratulating everyone on the occasion of the fund's 15th anniversary. Over the past years, it has made a significant positive contribution to promoting public diplomacy of the Russian Federation, strengthening friendly ties, trust, and mutual understanding between the people of our country and the peoples from partner countries, as well as to advancing unifying approaches to addressing global challenges of our time.
I'd like to take this opportunity and give Mr Drachevsky, on behalf of the Ministry's senior officials, letters of appreciation to the fund's employees who have made a particularly valuable contribution to ensuring the successful completion of its tasks.
I will not spend much time discussing the international situation. I think everyone here is closely following international developments and the world-changing dynamics that are unfolding before our eyes.
The formation of a fairer multipolar world order is the core trend. New global centres outside the global West - China and India, as well as our other BRICS and the SCO partners - are getting increasingly stronger and striving for independence. These countries also include most of the countries of Eurasia, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, in a word, the countries that have become known as non-West. These countries represent different civilisations, cultures and religions, but all of them are committed to democratisation of international life, have a stake in sovereign, peaceful and predictable development, and reject any and all forms of external diktat and pressure, as well as modern neo-colonial practices.
It is quite telling that the West, which tends to put human rights and democracy front and centre at every turn, focuses on democracy inside sovereign states, which it wants to mold in its own image and likeness. When we brought up democratisation of international relations with our Western partners - we rarely communicate with him now - they would get utterly defensive, and it appeared that everything we had to say fell on deaf ears.
Just like Russia, the non-West countries that I just mentioned want the reconstituted multipolar world order to be recognised by all participants of international communication and to rely on the principles of the UN Charter in their complete form and interrelation.
In conjunction with our partners, we are working to achieve this goal and paying extra attention to building up ties with the World Majority countries. In this regard, we are consistently implementing the relevant provisions of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation approved by President Vladimir Putin in March 2023.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko paid a visit to Moscow recently. His visit gave a boost to integration efforts across all areas of bilateral interaction with our closest ally. Our relations with the People's Republic of China are characterised by comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation, as well as an unprecedented level of mutual trust. We enjoy a particularly privileged strategic partnership with India. Significant progress has been made in broadening and deepening friendly ties with countries such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Great emphasis is placed on strengthening all areas of cooperation with our allies and partners from among the CIS member states within the Commonwealth itself and as part of the CSTO and the EAEU.
Russia maintains an intensive political dialogue, including at the highest level, with SCO and BRICS countries, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela and other like-minded nations, including within the framework of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter, which has been established in New York and regularly meets at the level of deputy foreign ministers and national coordinators. Some meetings have been held at the ministerial level. We intend to continue this practice. We are working together with our African friends to implement the agreements reached at the 2nd Russia-Africa Summit held in St Petersburg in July 2023 and at the 1st Ministerial Conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum held in November 2024. The forum was established by the decision of the heads of state who attended the summit in St Petersburg in 2023.
We are striving to make a substantial and realistic contribution to promoting an international discussion on reforming the global governance system and adjusting to the realities of the multipolar world. I would like to once again draw your attention to the long-term and forward-looking initiative of President Putin for creating an architecture of equal and indivisible security in the Eurasian continent. This strategic project is a follow-up to President Putin's initiative to create a Greater Eurasian Partnership, which is objectively developing as a result of interaction between the EAEU, ASEAN, the SCO and other integration associations. These integration processes and harmonisation are not artificially but objectively creating a material foundation for a system of Eurasian security architecture. We continue working together with our Belarusian and other associates to promote a new Eurasian architecture model at various discussions and political platforms, including the annual conferences on this subject held in Minsk at the initiative of President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko.
We would like to point out that, apart from a large number of subregional integration associations that exist in Africa and Latin America, there are also Eurasian and African continental organisations, like the African Union and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which include all countries of the region without exception. The Eurasian continent does not have such an umbrella structure where all Eurasian countries without exception could regularly meet to discuss issues of concern to them and, most importantly, look for ways to benefit from the advantages, which history and nature have bestowed on the world's largest continent in terms of civilisations that developed and prospered there. That is a task for our political scientists. I have no doubt that the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund will contribute to this.
What I have just mentioned is by no means a complete list of the priorities that our diplomacy has. It is important for us to feel support from non-governmental entities such as the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund, the Russian International Affairs Council, the Valdai International Discussion Club and the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy. We have many partners, and all of them contribute to our discourse. This also includes MGIMO University, Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics and other academic institutions.
Today we are considering the further work of the Gorchakov Fund, the key areas for its future activities, which we are to approve today. The proposals have been circulated.
I would like to emphasise once again that public diplomacy remains a highly relevant resource when it comes to fostering an objective view of Russia. Personally, I prefer avoiding phrases referring to a 'positive' image of Russia. We do not need any extra points with the foreign public. What we need is to be viewed objectively - unlike the West, which considers itself infallible and suffers from exceptionality delusions. However, even in those countries where governments perceive Russia as an enemy and say as much, governments that take short-sighted steps, trying to pave the way for unfriendly steps for years ahead, many people still sympathise with our country and share spiritual and moral values that are common to all religions as well as secular humanism. We know that everything will fall into place with time.
This year, Russia celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory in the Great Patriotic War and World War II, as well as the 80th anniversary of the United Nations. Therefore, it becomes particularly relevant to double down on countering falsifications of history and revanchist ideologies, which we are witnessing in many EU countries. We are dealing with neo-Nazism, Russophobia and other misanthropic and racist ideologies.
Undeniably, we will further pursue the ongoing effort to denazify the state that remains under the control of the Kiev regime. That state is now consistently exterminating all things Russian, legislatively and physically, including the Russian language, culture, media and canonical Orthodoxy, in direct and gross violation of Article 1 of the UN Charter and Ukraine's international obligations, with the full connivance and complicity of the European states. They proclaim their commitment to human rights and minority rights, shout it from the rooftops, but not in Ukraine. Ukraine is different, of course. Ukraine is where they have nurtured new Nazis for another attempt to rally the whole of Europe to their racist Nazi cause and march on the Russian Federation.
I would like to thank all active members of the Board of Trustees for their contribution to the activities of the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund and for their help in implementing its projects and initiatives. I look forward to continuing our constructive and beneficial cooperation.
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