Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov traveled to Brest, Belarus on Nov. 21-22 to meet with Belarusian Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov, on questions of economic and strategic security, as well as deepening cooperation between the two nations. The pair laid a wreath at the Eternal Flame memorial to mark the 80th anniversary of Belarus’s liberation from the Nazi forces, and afterward, met with university students to discuss “the preservation of historical memory and the prevention of attempts to glorify Nazis or equal Nazi criminals with the liberators of Europe,” Lavrov said in his opening statement to the two leaders’ joint press conference.
Lavrov reported that he and Ryzhenkov discussed a number of topics, including the “imperative of countering legal aggression,” as the West blatantly breaches international law “when it [becomes] necessary to penalize competitors—in this instance, the Russian Federation. Numerous other nations, including the Republic of Belarus, also face this pressure.… We must cultivate our own platforms to render us immune to the West’s capricious conduct. BRICS”—Belarus recently became a BRICS partner nation—"and the SCO are advancing this objective, as are efforts within the Union State and the EAEU.”
Lavrov commented that the sanctions against Russia have had benefits, as they “not only forced us to act, but also served the beneficial role of deterring reliance on those who have proven utterly unreliable as negotiating partners.”
He then came to the question of security, reporting that the proposal made by Belarus at the Minsk International Conference on Eurasian Security in late October for a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century was moving forward: “Today, one of the documents emerging from the Collegium meeting was our joint statement outlining a vision for this Charter. The ensuing step is to draft the Charter itself, commencing this endeavor with all our partners in the SCO, CIS, and CSTO.”
In response to a question on whether the outgoing Biden administration will try add more fuel to the fire before it leaves, Lavrov commented that Zelenskyy was clearly frightened by the Russian response, accusing the West of leaving him unarmed for such an attack, and that the permission given to Ukraine by the Biden administration to use ATACMS missiles spells “bad legacy” for the incoming Trump administration. He commented that this apparently “runs in the Democratic Party’s blood,” and recalled the Obama administration’s “dirty trick” of expelling more than 120 Russian diplomats just weeks before Trump began his first term.
