Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s opening remarks at the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Alexander Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund, Moscow, March 13, 2024

Colleagues,

I am glad to see all of you at this latest meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Alexander Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund.

Once again, I would like to thank all the Fund’s staff members and senior executives for their contribution to developing public diplomacy in keeping with the single foreign policy line as approved by President Vladimir Putin.

Efforts in this dimension of diplomacy have never been as relevant as they are today. You know this and I do not need to elaborate on this point: the collective West has completely dismantled the European security framework and is obsessed with the idea of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. Suffice to quote statements by President of France Emmanuel Macron on sending NATO troops to Ukraine along with a host of other verbal gems coming from senior European government officials. This aggressive position towards our country is part of Western policy and its efforts to hinder the objective advancement towards a more democratic system of international relations. They understand all too well that it is Western dominance in global affairs and the end of their hegemony that are at stake in Ukraine. You may remember that President Vladimir Putin spoke at length on this topic during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, and he went on to highlight this matter when he sat down for an interview with Dmitry Kiselev today.

We can all see that the global balance of power is shifting in favour of the Global Majority. This is literally happening on our watch. New centres of growth are emerging across the Global South and East. These centres include both sovereign states and regional organisations – I will elaborate on this point later in my remarks. They reject the colonial legacy and are committed to achieving real independence by asserting their national interests and starting to prioritise their history and historical identities, while also calling for international affairs to be governed in accord with a holistic and interconnected vision of the principles set forth in the UN Charter.

In this context, I keep referring to the sovereign equality of states. The Charter designates it as a fundamental principle of the United Nations, but since its establishment, and even before that, the West has never followed this tenet no matter what international issue it had to deal with. It would be of crucial importance if we had actually succeeded in fulfilling all the principles stipulated by this international legal instrument.

During the Games of the Future in Kazan and the World Youth Festival in Sochi, which were unique and world-spanning international events, the Global Majority demonstrated its commitment to promoting its own interests and the fact that it no longer had any appetite for silently and obediently following the Western hegemons.

The West adopted an inadequate and hysterical position towards Russia in the spirit of colonial-era practices, primarily regarding the special military operation, but this only accelerated the emergence of a multipolar world. Among the harbingers of this phenomenon is the fact that many countries have been switching to their national currencies in mutual trade, considering that the collective West in its current agony may well use its illegal sanctions truncheon against any country at any given moment. This served as an incentive for creating inter-banking mechanisms outside the Western perimeter and the building of new international transport corridors, as well as efforts to establish alternative production and value chains and many other initiatives to enable every country with a sense of self-respect to stay on the path towards sustained economic development. In the sphere of international affairs, we have been paying special attention to forging closer ties and cooperating with countries suffering from Western sanctions wars. This is quite a serious alliance of like-minded states, and I am certain that it will have an opportunity to weigh in on all these matters.

Multilateral diplomacy is experiencing dramatic shifts. Regional organisations are growing in importance. Simultaneously, BRICS, where Russia holds the presidency this year, is gaining in prestige and influence. After the accession of Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Ethiopia, BRICS is a platform for dialogue and collaboration between the leading players in the Global Majority as well as a supporting pillar of the polycentric world order.

Let me also note that amid the absolute degradation of the OSCE as a Euro-Atlantic symbol, a circumstance I mentioned earlier, it is becoming more important, at the regional level, to create a new, equal and indivisible security architecture in Eurasia, one that can complement and promote the process of forming the Greater Eurasian Partnership, which has been repeatedly mentioned by President of Russia Vladimir Putin and which is taking shape through the efforts of the EAEU, the SCO, ASEAN , and the CIS.

It is clear that promoting the process of forming the Greater Eurasian Partnership will also create a firm economic foundation for stronger security on our huge Eurasian continent. President Vladimir Putin mentioned this in his Address to the Federal Assembly. We initiated the practical work to build the foundations of this system in October 2023, when Russia took part in an international conference in Minsk, convened by the Belarusian CSTO chairmanship, dedicated to the processes of forming and planning a Eurasian security system. An interesting discussion took place. The work continues at various venues, including the CSTO, but not just the CSTO. We are planning to invite other multilateral regional associations to join these efforts. 

Along with the strengthening of regional processes in Eurasia, we are seeing identical trends on the African continent, with its numerous sub-regional organisations in addition to the African Union. CELAC in Latin America and the Caribbean is bolstered by sub-regional associations such as ALBA, MERCOSUR, UNASUR, the Central American Integration System, where Russia has been granted observer status, and the Caribbean Community.

There are also integration processes involving the Global Majority at the global level, which are proceeding in parallel with these noticeably more pro-active regional integration processes. The participating countries are increasingly eager to independently sort out the prospects for their economic development and are unwilling to remain dependent on those who have proved their absolute intractability as supervisors and operators of the international monetary system. BRICS is a truly global association. It can stimulate an effective effort to create an equitable and just mechanism (or even mechanisms) for regulating international relations.

These are our assessments of the current situation, which are consistent with the President’s Address to the Federal Assembly, Russia’s foreign policy concept approved in 2023, as well as the major conceptual interviews that President Vladimir Putin has given over the past few weeks.

We appreciate the efforts of the Alexander Gorchakov Fund and hope that its current activities and plans for the future will contribute to the promotion of our foreign policy concept and foreign policy interests. We appreciate the work you are doing to expand ties with your partners from public non-governmental organisations in the Global South and East. We will do our best to facilitate your work, including by providing financial support. I know that you keep up this work and that many of those present are directly involved in it and are making a substantial contribution to the Fund’s effectiveness. I do appreciate that.

The proposed priorities for next year (Leonid Drachevsky will speak about them) are consistent with the objectives President Vladimir Putin set forth in the documents and remarks I have mentioned. I would just like to highlight a few of them that the ministry, as a founder, sees as the most important at this stage: progress towards a multipolar world order, a polycentric international system, building Eurasian security architecture. The Euro-Atlantic concept has failed, as we can all see, and a new international cooperation infrastructure needs to be formed which will be invulnerable to sanctions. In this regard, I would also include the task of combating modern neocolonial practices, which was the subject of an inter-party international conference recently convened by United Russia in Moscow.