United Nations – (EFE).- The Russian government said this Saturday at the UN that the West (United States and the European Union) “is not neutral, but rather part of the conflict”, in the words of its Foreign Minister, Serguei Lavrov, who He assured that his country “will respect the results” of the referendums in the regions of Ukraine that these days vote for its possible annexation to Russia.
After delivering his speech to the General Assembly, Lavrov appeared in a press room packed with journalists where he dodged many questions and insisted on the rhetoric that Europe has allowed “Russophobia” and “racism” to flourish leading to the current war in Ukraine, supposedly launched in aid of the Russian minority.
Asked about the possible recourse to nuclear weapons, suggested by President Vladimir Putin this week, Lavrov did not want to add fuel to the fire and specified that this recourse is clearly regulated by the nuclear security doctrine, and said he was unaware of the alleged threats of attacks that some US official would have uttered depending on the results of the referendums.
As for the flight of thousands of Russian men after the mobilization of 300,000 reservists was decreed, he resorted to irony and asked the journalist if she did not know the principle of “freedom of movement.”
The press conference lasted almost an hour, and the most repeated ideas by Lavrov were those of “Russophobia” which, according to him, has been practiced in Europe for years, first in the Baltic countries against ethnically Russian communities and now in Ukraine. .
According to him, a “dictatorship” is being practiced in Europe in relation to Russia, and he explained how in this General Assembly a representative of Cyprus was prohibited from meeting with Russian diplomats “by orders of the European Union”, and assured that two other countries Europeans asked him to meet him but begged him not to go public for fear of reprisals from other EU states.
WINKS TO THE THIRD WORLD
Lavrov said that the Security Council, the highest body of the UN, is dominated by Western countries and that it is time for countries like Brazil or India, as well as someone representing the African continent, to have a permanent seat on the Council.
He criticized Western countries for allegedly pressuring Latin American, African and Asian countries to align with them in the Ukraine conflict: “The ‘them or us’ philosophy has not disappeared in Europe,” he said, and considered that the same it has happened in Ukraine itself, where its people have been forced into the arms of the West and against Russia.
In a clear nod to China and India, two countries that have been equidistant since the beginning of the invasion and have avoided criticizing Russia, Lavrov also criticized the recent NATO doctrine expressed at the last Madrid summit and which extends the concept security of its members not only to Eastern Europe, but “to the Indo-Pacific region and the China Sea”.
CLAIM FOR A MULTIPOLAR UN
In his previous intervention before the UN, Lavrov did not charge against the UN or its structures, but rather called for a new world architecture that reflects the multilateralism on which the United Nations is supposedly based: “The unipolar model of the world is over.”
Lavrov said that since the end of the Cold War, the United States had arrogated the right to intervene where it deemed necessary – he cited the cases of Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan – and asked himself rhetorically: “Has their situation improved? Do they live better now?
The United States “considers the entire world as its backyard,” he stressed.
“They want to privatize the (UN) secretariat with a neoliberal narrative -he explained-, but we ask that the founding charter be followed and a geographical representation be reflected so that there is no country that dominates the secretariat.”
