Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov repeated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call for a Five Power (P-5) summit during a wide-ranging lecture at the Far Eastern Federal University, where he spoke on U.S. Russian relations, among other issues.
Lavrov said that while China and France have supported Russia’s proposal for a summit meeting of the leaders of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. “has not yet responded to our reminders. But they are looking at this initiative. The United Kingdom, I think, is waiting, as usual, for what the United States is going to say. We are used to that, nothing new.”
On the issue of strategic stability with the United States, Lavrov said: “Naturally, when we speak about the necessity to discuss strategic stability in all of its dimensions, we mean all the factors influencing this strategic stability. They include nuclear weapons, non-nuclear strategic weapons, offensive and defensive strategic systems, and, of course, we cannot ignore the fact that the Americans are working on a program for the deployment of offensive weapons in outer space in the context of the global missile defense system.”
Lavrov said Russia has not yet received a clear response from Washington to its proposal to launch dialogue on cybersecurity issues: “They keep accusing us of hacking attacks, alleging that we are undermining the security of almost all Western countries. However, we haven’t received a clear response yet to our numerous offers to actually work together in order to address specific issues and real problems instead of artificial ones, though [U.S.] President Biden handed down instructions to consider establishing such a dialogue in addition to our strategic stability dialogue following a reminder from [Russian] President Putin.”
Warning that the West may interfere in the upcoming elections to the State Duma, Lavrov said, “we will see new attempts to shake, destabilize the situation, to provoke protests, preferably violent protests, as the West is in the habit of doing. A campaign for the non-recognition of our elections will probably follow. Such plans do exist and we know about them.” He added that the “West-hatched scenarios will never be implemented.”
He also warned that the West is using a wide “arsenal of instruments” to influence Russia’s foreign and domestic policy. “For instance, military provocations, like the one with NATO warships near Crimea — by the way, they are heading here, to the South China Sea — it looks like their ambitions have no limits,” Lavrov noted. “And, naturally, such instruments include illegitimate economic sanctions, the seizure of our nationals abroad, with laying claims that are to be settled under international agreements but the West ignores them, and large-scale information attacks.”
Lavrov stressed that all attempts to isolate Russia have failed,because it is continuously expanding its relations among nations internationally. “So, probably, any unbiased person can see that any isolation of Russia that our Western colleagues keep on speaking about is out of the question. Moreover, we are winning over more and more friends, although the United States and its allies are seeking to hinder this process,” he stressed.
“Our Western colleagues are especially active here, in the Asia Pacific region, with its key new world centers of economic development and political influence. I mean, first of all, our really strategic partners — China and Japan, which actively and consistently strengthen their political, economic, and technological sovereignty, their cultural and civilizational identity,” he added.
Speaking on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said it demonstrated the U.S. failure after 20 years. He also criticized the Afghan government for not forming an interim regime with the Taliban.
“The United States is not merely withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, it is doing that having actually recognized the failure of its twenty-year-long mission,” he said and pointed out that terrorist and drug threats have dramatically increased since 2001 and that “there are documents in the West indicating the probability that U.S. servicemen were involved in drug trafficking.” He also pointed to the fact that the Islamic State is “deliberately pulling its forces in Afghanistan’s northern provinces bordering our allies,” he said.
The Russian Foreign Minister also warned that the mistake of Kabul’s unwillingness to form an interim government with the Taliban movement has created the conditions for a “force scenario.”
