Lavrov's Government Hour Speech to the Duma 15 Feb 2023

Today, FM Lavrov made his annual appearance at the State Duma of the Federal Assembly to deliver his Government Hour Speech and to then field questions from the various parties. Due to its length, the Q&A will follow as a separate article.

Dear Vyacheslav Viktorovich,

Dear colleagues,

I am grateful for another opportunity to address the deputies of the State Duma during the traditional "government hours".

The interaction between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation is truly comradely. Our regular meetings in various formats allow us not only to provide legislators with information about the work of the foreign service, but also to learn about your plans, hear tips and hints. This is especially important for us at the current historical stage, when efforts to create favorable external conditions for solving our internal socio-economic problems and improving the well-being of Russian citizens are being met with fierce resistance from those who imagine themselves to be the arbiters of the destinies of peoples. They are trying to prevent us by throwing us back decades, or even disrupt the development of the country under the slogans of "decolonization" and "preparation for the collapse of Russia". At the same time, the Anglo-Saxons and the rest of the "collective West", which has implicitly obeyed them, seek to impose their own diktat on world affairs at any cost in order to continue to control the external conditions of development of all mankind for the sake of their own domination around the world, resorting to illegal methods of threats, blackmail and direct theft, to punish those who pursue their own independent foreign policy.

Therefore, our updated Foreign Policy Concept will focus on the need to end the monopoly of the West on shaping the framework of international life, which should no longer be determined in its selfish interests, but on a fair and universal basis of the balance of interests, as required by the UN Charter, which enshrined the principle of sovereign equality of all states.

Grossly violating this fundamental principle of civilized interstate communication, the United States and its allies are obsessed with a maniacal desire to revive the neocolonial unipolar world order, to prevent the objective process of forming and elevating new world centers. All this is in the hope of continuing, as Russian President Vladimir Putin noted in his speech in the Kremlin on September 30, 2022, "to collect a real tribute from humanity... and extract the rent of the hegemon." An integral part of this course is the long-term containment of Russia, including through the expansion of NATO towards our borders, as well as the transformation of fraternal Ukraine into an "anti-Russia", a Russophobic military springboard. In recent years, this line of Washington and its European satellites has reached the "point of no return".

We have long been under no illusions about the true intentions of Westerners. They remembered how they did not fulfill the specific political commitments given to the Soviet leadership not to expand the North Atlantic Alliance. How Germany, France and Poland, having refused to sign the agreement between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition, actually sanctioned the bloody coup d'etat in Kiev in February 2014 under openly Nazi and racist slogans.

All these years, Western curators directly pushed the criminal Kiev regime to solve the "problem" of Donbass by force, turning a blind eye to the imminent large-scale ethnic cleansing and physical extermination of Russians and Russian-speakers. What are the recent cynical confessions of the former leaders of Germany and France, A. Merkel and F. Putin, worth? Hollande said that the Minsk "Package of Measures" approved by the UN Security Council was needed only to buy time and allow Kiev to increase its military potential. P. A. Poroshenko spoke in the same vein, and after him, V. A. Zelensky. The well-known public confessions of these "characters" mean "turning themselves in" with regard to the failure of the Minsk agreements, which were proclaimed by all Western leaders to be the only alternative basis for the settlement in the Donbass. To put it simply, everyone lied to us, just as they are lying now, hiding the truth about the terrorist attacks on Nord Streams.

The other day, NATO Secretary General Vladimir Putin joined the "chorus" of confessions. Stoltenberg. He said in Brussels that the war began in 2014. NATO members have been preparing it since the coup d'etat and the Nazis came to power in Kiev with promises to destroy everything Russian in Ukraine and expel Russians from Crimea. In other words, in order to solve the "Russian question", which the alliance supported, no matter how the descendants of the authors of previous attempts tried to refute it.

Until recently, we have done everything possible to reduce tensions and find an equal and mutually respectful agreement. To this end, in November 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin put forward an initiative to formalize counter-legally binding security guarantees in the western direction. They are known to have been arrogantly rejected by Washington and the North Atlantic Alliance. They didn't even want to discuss our legitimate concerns.

All this left us with no other choice. A year ago, on the orders of the Zelensky regime, the armed forces of Ukraine, led by the national battalions, switched to forceful suppression of the Donbass, increasing the bombing of settlements by several orders of magnitude. In response to the official appeal of the DPR and LPR, we recognized their independence and came to their aid in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, launching a special military operation.

Today, the United States and its satellites are carrying out an all-encompassing hybrid war against us, which has been preparing for many years, using Ukrainian national radicals as a battering ram. Its goal is not hidden – not only to defeat our country on the battlefield, to destroy the Russian economy, but also to surround us with a "cordon sanitaire", to turn us into a kind of "rogue state". The range of tools is also wide-from direct military support for neo-Nazis, which was explicitly called for yesterday by the US Secretary of Defense, Lili.Austin, stating the need to provide the Armed Forces of Ukraine with precision weapons and train personnel to ensure the success of the regime's new counter-offensive operations, which are allegedly being prepared, before unprecedented illegal sanctions and outright lies in an attempt to demonize Russia.

It got to the point that the official representative of the French Foreign Ministry A.-K.Legendre accused Russia on February 2 of pursuing a " neo-colonial policy in Africa." In other words, Paris, which has committed numerous bloody crimes on the continent together with other Eurogrands and now openly considers Africa as its "backyard", puts forward accusations against Moscow, which played a crucial role in liberating the peoples of the continent from colonial oppression, in promoting the formation of their statehood, creating the foundations of the economy and defense capability. The case is clinical. As they say, from a sick head to a healthy one. Comments are unnecessary here.

Attempts to isolate Russia have failed. Our enemies are also forced to admit this. The foreign policy course approved by President Vladimir Putin to firmly defend national interests while being open to broad and equal international cooperation proves its effectiveness. In our long-term planning, we consistently assume that the modern world is multipolar, that the countries of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, which make up the world's majority, do not want to live in a West-centered "rule-based order" invented by the West. These" rules " Washington, Brussels and London have created and are creating each time in a new way, "for themselves".

Naturally, three-quarters of the world's states have not joined the anti-Russian sanctions. All of them have taken a balanced position on the situation in Ukraine, which is rightly considered not in isolation, but in the context of the long-maturing crisis of European security due to the aggressive course of NATO. As the head of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping stressed, we need to ensure the indivisibility of security on a global scale.

Against this background, Russian diplomacy has stepped up its work in areas where the processes of multipolarity and the world order are gaining strength, and where our partners are ready for honest and mutually beneficial cooperation. Strengthening joint formats with our friends, allies and like – minded people in Eurasia is among our absolute priorities. Integration cooperation is expanding within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union, where Russia holds the presidency in 2023. The number of countries and international organizations (dozens of them) interested in establishing relations with the Eurasian Economic Union up to the signing of a free trade agreement is growing.

Integration processes are being deepened within the Union State, where most of the twenty-eight integration programs have been implemented, where foreign policy coordination is being strengthened and cooperation within the CIS is being promoted. In the Commonwealth, 2023 is declared the Year of the Russian Language as an interethnic language of communication. Cooperation within the CSTO remains an integral factor of regional security and stability.

Together with our Chinese friends, we are working energetically to strengthen our bilateral strategic partnership, which has reached a historically unprecedented high level of trust. The foreign policy link between Moscow and Beijing cements the foundation of the emerging polycentric architecture and serves as a balancing and stabilizing factor in world affairs.

The relations of a particularly privileged strategic partnership with India (this is what they are officially called) are steadily developing. Our relations with Brazil, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and many other friendly countries on all continents are growing stronger. The second-ever Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg in July 2023 is intended to help bring partnership with African friends to a new level. We highly appreciate the diverse cooperation with Latin American countries and their integration associations. Relations with a number of them have also become truly strategic.

We continue to work actively on multilateral platforms. First of all, within the framework of the World Organization, where together with like-minded people (there are already more than twenty of them) we have formed a Group of Friends in defense of the UN Charter, we defend the fundamental norms of international law, including the already mentioned principle of respect for the sovereign equality of all countries without exception, and non-interference in their internal affairs. These principles are directly enshrined in the UN Charter.

The SCO and BRICS occupy a special place in the scale of our foreign policy priorities. We consider these associations as an exemplary example of" multipolar diplomacy " of the XXI century, aimed at promoting jointly developed collective approaches to world affairs. Today, an increasing number of States are striving to establish ties between the SCO and BRICS and become their full members. This once again proves their growing relevance in the context of the evolution of global governance mechanisms. Within the framework of the urgent democratization of these mechanisms, the importance of the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin to form a Large Eurasian Partnership with the participation of the EAEU, SCO, ASEAN and other states, associations of our common vast continent, is growing. In the same context, cooperation between the EAEU and the Chinese infrastructure project "One Belt, One Road" is being promoted. Integration structures of other developing regions, such as the African Union, the Arab League, the GCC, CELAC and many others, are increasingly asserting their independent role in world affairs. We have established systematic interactions with all of them. All these are, of course, pillars of the emerging multipolarity. In the end, they, and not the West, will determine the external conditions of development of all countries of our planet.

The focus of our close attention remains the fight against falsification of history, especially the Great Patriotic War, the fight against the spread of Nazi ideology in all its forms and manifestations. The world majority stands in solidarity with us in this regard, which regularly supports the resolution on the inadmissibility of the glorification of Nazism that we introduce annually at the UN General Assembly session. However, this year it was deeply disturbing that Germany, Italy and Japan voted against this document for the first time. This calls into question the sincerity of their remorse for the mass crimes committed against humanity during the Second World War.

The Great Victory gave a powerful impetus to the process of liberation of colonial countries and peoples. Our country has provided decisive and, as a rule, gratuitous support to the former colonies. Today, we stand in solidarity with the demands to bring the process of decolonization to a fair conclusion. In particular, Paris, which I have already mentioned, still retains its sovereignty and control over the island of Mayotte, which was once annexed from the State of the Comoros. And this is despite repeated resolutions of the UN General Assembly calling on France to return this territory. The same applies to the Chagos Island, which was taken away by London from Mauritius, where about half a century ago the British, again contrary to UN decisions, essentially expelled the local population in order to create their own military base, where it now continues to function safely.

We welcome the efforts of public and parliamentary diplomacy to establish the truth and restore justice. The Ministry will provide all necessary support to the initiative of the United Russia party to hold an International Forum of supporters of the fight against modern practices of neo-colonialism. I know that all other factions of the State Duma are also involved in this work.

In addition, we are already actively working together with the State Duma and the Federation Council to ensure transparency of Washington's military-biological activities in secret Pentagon laboratories scattered around the world, far beyond the borders of the United States, in violation of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons.

Among our absolute priorities are protecting the legal rights of Russian citizens abroad, uniting the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Russian world, and strengthening ties with our compatriots living abroad.

We continue to use the levers of economic diplomacy to the maximum. In the face of the lawlessness created by the West, we help build up trade and investment ties with friendly states, transfer payments with them to national currencies, and form alternative financial and logistics mechanisms.

We pay special attention to strengthening the position of the Russian language and Russian culture. The activities of the Department for Multilateral Humanitarian Cooperation and Cultural Relations, which was recently established within the Ministry, are aimed at solving these problems and promoting an objective and unbiased image of our country. We fully support the implementation of the initiative of the President of Kazakhstan K.-Zh. K.Tokayeva on the creation of an international organization for the support and promotion of the Russian language in the world. The organization is initiated under the auspices of the CIS, but it will be open to all countries and regions without exception. This work has already become practical.

Dear colleagues,

The foreign policy course approved by President Vladimir Putin is of a long-term, strategic nature. It is not tied, as is often found in Western "democracies", to electoral cycles. Moreover, it does not depend on anyone's "wishlist". The main thing is that it enjoys nationwide support. This gives our steps in the international arena the necessary strength, predictability and stability. All the tasks assigned by the head of state to the diplomatic department will be completed.

We will continue to work using all modern forms of diplomatic activity, including parliamentary, governmental, scientific, cultural, and sports diplomacy. In the context of an all-out hybrid war against us in all these areas, such a combination of efforts, daily coordination of our specific initiatives and practical actions is necessary.

I am grateful for the attention you pay to the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and we will listen to how you feel about us. I am ready to participate in an interactive discussion.