Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's remarks and answers to media questions following talks with Foreign Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Gedion Timothewos, Moscow, October 21, 2025
21 October 2025 15:30
1742-21-10-2025
Ladies and gentlemen,
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Gedion Timothewos and I have held a very substantial and useful meeting. We have known each other for a long time, and value the trust-based relations between us.
Regular meetings between President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed are of special importance for the development of our partnership.
We have stated that Russian-Ethiopian relations are developing in a successful and progressive manner and are impervious to fluctuations in international situation or any other context. We share the commitment to expanding our cooperation in various areas and implementing agreements reached by our leaders. The latest meeting between President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed took place in September of this year, when Mr Abiy Ahmed attended World Atomic Week. They held extensive talks on the sidelines of this forum, which culminated in the coordination of several important long-term documents.
We have agreed that our foreign ministries will be pro-active in facilitating the further development and intensification of our trade and economic ties and in promoting mutually beneficial energy projects, including those in the nuclear power industry. The latter is a new area of our cooperation and was also on the agenda of talks between President Putin and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in September, culminating in the signing of important documents.
There is also a positive outlook and traditions in such areas as healthcare, culture and education. We have agreed to actively incentivise the attainment of agreements in the financial sphere so as to safeguard our trade and investment cooperation against the illegal unilateral sanctions that our Western "colleagues" are so keen on nowadays.
We have decided to intensify the activity and use more effectively the potential of the Intergovernmental Commission on Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation and Trade. Mr Minister had a meeting with Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation Maxim Reshetnikov, who is the Russian co-chair of the Commission. A full-scale meeting is being planned for the near future.
We also talked about the successful work of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Military-Technical Cooperation, which met in May of this year. We have good traditions in this sphere and are always ready to take into account the interests of our Ethiopian friends in ensuring their defence capability on a reliable basis.
We held comprehensive discussions on the state of the treaty framework underpinning our bilateral relations. This framework continues to evolve successfully. Several agreements are nearing the completion of their ratification procedures, while others remain under negotiation and are, as the saying goes, already in the pipeline.
The training of Ethiopian citizens in Russian educational institutions remains a traditionally vital area of our collaboration. We are prepared to augment the thousands of Ethiopians who have already been educated in our country with an annual allocation of scholarships specifically tailored to the needs of our Ethiopian friends.
We also explored a more recent avenue of collaboration - media cooperation between Russia and Ethiopia. The Minister spoke highly of the work conducted by our Sputnik news agency, which continues to grow in popularity. Its audience is expanding, a development we welcome. In today's world, conveying the truth to audiences across diverse nations remains an essential task.
Our discussions extended to international and regional affairs. Russia and Ethiopia stand united in upholding the principles of the UN Charter in their entirety and advocating for a more equitable, multipolar world order that reflects the cultural and civilisational diversity of our time. As two nations with rich historical legacies, we firmly support the right of all peoples to independently determine their optimal pathways of political and socioeconomic development.
We agreed to continue coordinating our approaches within the United Nations, as well as under the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The inaugural ministerial conference under this format took place in 2024, with a second scheduled for this year.
Undoubtedly, when addressing the formation of a multipolar world order and defending the principles of justice, equality, and mutual respect, the role of BRICS is increasingly significant. Ethiopia became a full member of this group last year, and we have already established close contacts in preparation for summits and ministerial conferences.
Today, we paid particular attention to crisis resolution on the African continent, with a focus on the Horn of Africa. The Minister provided a detailed assessment of Ethiopia's perspective on developments in this strategically important - and, regrettably, historically volatile - region. We emphasised the imperative of resolving any disagreements among African nations exclusively through peaceful means and in full compliance with international law, adhering to the principle Russia has always championed: "African solutions to African problems."
There have been instances in the past - and residual tendencies persist - where former colonial powers in the UN Security Council have sought to take charge of resolving African issues. We consider such attempts counterproductive. We will steadfastly uphold the right of the African Union and sub-regional organisations on the continent to facilitate solutions in a manner that aligns with African interests and ensures sustainable outcomes.
I expressed our gratitude - and reaffirmed this assessment - to our Ethiopian friends for their consistently objective, measured, and balanced appraisal of the situation surrounding Ukraine, a crisis precipitated by the West's longstanding policy of transforming the country into a staging ground for containing the Russian Federation, creating military threats directly on Russia's borders, and suppressing all things Russian - history, education, language, and culture. The regime of Vladimir Zelensky actively pursues this agenda, which, alongside the push to draw Ukraine into NATO, became a key reason for President Vladimir Putin to initiate the special military operation. This operation is achieving its objectives, and there is no doubt that it will conclude successfully.
Question: How are preparations progressing for the upcoming Russian-American summit in Budapest?
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: Yesterday, I engaged in a comprehensive discussion with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in line with the agreement reached by the Presidents of Russia and the United States on October 16 during their telephone conversation.
We reaffirmed our steadfast commitment to proceed in accordance with the understandings and agreements reached between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump - primarily in Alaska - as well as during their subsequent telephone exchanges.
With Secretary Rubio, we reviewed the current state of affairs and explored how to finalise the broadly agreed-upon framework for another meeting, which the US President proposed should be held in Budapest. Naturally, the focus is not on the location - though the venue does matter in this context, given commotion stirred by those who oppose a European Union as an association of sovereign states and prefer all decisions to be made by its Brussels bureaucracy. The key issue, however, remains not the place or the timing, but how we advance on the substantive tasks agreed upon - those which garnered broad consensus in Anchorage.
We agreed to continue these telephone consultations to better assess where we stand and determine the right way forward.
Today, I was surprised to read a CNN report suggesting that the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump may be postponed, as US officials concluded after our yesterday's call with Secretary Rubio that Russia's position has barely shifted since the initial talks and remains wedded to its original maximalist demands.
The lack of integrity in many Western media outlets is well-known. CNN, too, has earned its reputation in this regard. They tend to favour simplistic slogans - injected and hammered home to the audience - over serious analytical work.
I wish to officially confirm that Russia has not altered its positions from the understandings achieved during the extensive negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Alaska.
These understandings are grounded in the agreements reached at the time, which President Trump succinctly summarised when he stated that what is needed is a long-term, sustainable peace - not an immediate ceasefire that would lead nowhere. We remain fully committed to this formula, as I reiterated yesterday in my conversation with Secretary Rubio.
Now, voices from Washington suggest that we must halt immediately, cease all further discussion, and let history judge. But stopping now would mean ignoring the root causes of this conflict - causes clearly understood and articulated by the US administration upon Donald Trump's inauguration. I am referring to ensuring Ukraine's non-aligned, neutral, and nuclear-free status, which entails abandoning any attempts to draw it into NATO. I am also referring to ending the de facto genocide of Russian and Russian-speaking populations - a policy pursued by the Kiev regime even before Vladimir Zelensky came to power. Back then, they legislated against every conceivable right of the "national minority" - as Russians are formally labelled in Ukraine. Yet in reality, the majority of Ukraine's population speaks and thinks in Russian. The prohibition of the Russian language in all spheres of life is the hallmark of an absolutely Nazi regime - one that Vladimir Zelensky himself long sought to establish.
At some point, after French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stopped mentioning the need to inflict a "strategic defeat" on Russia, they began calling for an immediate ceasefire. Moreover, French President Emmanuel Macron stated that this ceasefire should be without any preconditions - including, as he publicly declared, any restrictions on arms deliveries to the Kiev regime. As the saying goes, the guilty man shouts the loudest - the motive behind this push for a truce became immediately apparent.
But most importantly, a ceasefire would not only allow for the rearmament of the Kiev regime but also encourage its terrorist activities - strikes on civilian infrastructure, attacks on civilians on Russian soil, sabotage operations like the Nord Stream bombings. The Polish government continues to provoke Vladimir Zelensky and his team into pursuing such actions. They have already justified one act of terrorism - the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines - and are themselves prepared to carry out more. I have heard that Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski even threatened that the safety of President Vladimir Putin's aircraft would not be guaranteed in Polish airspace should he fly to Budapest for the proposed summit with Donald Trump.
So, an official Polish court has ruled to justify the terrorist attack against the Nord Stream pipelines, and now Poland's foreign minister claims that if a Polish court demands it, they will obstruct the free passage of the Russian leader's plane. These are highly revealing developments.
Let me reiterate: an immediate ceasefire, suddenly back on the agenda, as opposed to addressing the root causes of the conflict, would mean only one thing - that a vast portion of Ukraine remains under Nazi rule. It would be the only place on Earth where an entire language is banned by law - a language that, incidentally, is one of the UN's official tongues and the native language of Ukraine's majority population. Those now lobbying our American colleagues to abandon their stance on long-term sustainable settlement - to simply stop and let history judge - are the same forces behind this push. We know who is handling this: Zelensky's European patrons and masters. But such an approach runs entirely counter to what Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump agreed upon in Anchorage - focusing on root causes, rejecting Ukraine's NATO integration, and fully securing the lawful rights of Russian and Russian-speaking populations. We remain ready to continue this work.
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