Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s opening remarks at the meeting with Foreign Minister of Hungary Peter Szijjarto, Moscow, December 2, 2024

Mr Minister,

Dear Peter,

Colleagues,

It is a pleasure to welcome you to Moscow. We maintain regular contact, as does President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban. They determine the strategic direction of our cooperation in all areas. As a result, we have a steady, long-term growth of trade and investment cooperation in the economy. This benefits the countries and the peoples of both Russia and Hungary.

The effectiveness of our agreements and the decisions made by our leadership is evident. Despite serious, artificially created challenges in the global economy, we are successfully implementing all the flagship projects of our partnership, including in the energy sector.

Following the recent meeting of our intergovernmental commission, which took place in Budapest in September, President Vladimir Putin issued instructions on all the issues raised by our Hungarian friends.

Today we have a good opportunity to discuss our interaction in European, Euro-Atlantic and international affairs in addition to the bilateral agenda.

We appreciate this sector of our partnership and the independent policy pursued by Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government, which is based primarily on national interests. We are convinced that this approach represents the future of world politics.

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I will add a few words. Primarily, on the situation around Ukraine. We absolutely agree that those who stand for peace take the right stance and those who believe that the war should go on until Russia is strategically defeated on the battlefield do not even reflect the interests of their peoples.

There are numerous initiatives put forward by countries on different continents. We can see that they are motivated by a sincere desire to make peace. For example, the recent “peace mission” by Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of the examples of such initiatives like a number of others, including the Chino-Brazilian, South African and Arab initiatives. We are ready to consider them all.

We have our own position. It is based on the will of people who found themselves in the war zone after the Kiev regime declared them terrorists. The rights of people to their native language, education, access to information in their native language, the canonical religion – all of these have been legislatively destroyed. I do not see how this crisis can be resolved without addressing the root cause.

It looks like human rights are a “banner” of Western diplomacy, be that NATO, the EU or the United States. However, when it comes to the rights of Russians in Ukraine human rights are not mentioned at all. It means only one thing to me: a policy for exterminating everything Russian. It has been approved and is encouraged by the leading Western countries.

Another reason is NATO’s eastward expansion, involvement of Ukraine into the alliance, meaning and declaring in that context the creation of direct military threats right at the borders of the Russian Federation.

On November 28 in Astana after the CSTO summit, President of Russia Vladimir Putin gave a big news conference where he once again confirmed that Ukraine's involvement in NATO is absolutely unacceptable. We will not allow this.

We believe that the problems constituting the underlying reasons of the crisis and our position on the need to provide for reliable security of the Russian Federation at the end of the crisis, secure human rights in Ukraine in compliance with Article 1 of the UN Charter is an absolutely fair position. We expect our friends, proposing peace initiatives in good faith, to take full account of these legitimate demands.

We are worried by what we hear more and more often in the West: in Brussels, London, Paris and Washington. They have begun to speak of a ceasefire as a means for giving Ukraine a respite and for themselves as a new opportunity to supply Ukraine with modern long-range weapons. This not a way to peace.

Western leaders by all appearances seem to be following Zelensky's wishes, indulging his every whim. This was their position – “not a word about Ukraine without Ukraine,” and the fact that they have been discussing Russia without Russia within the framework of the Zelensky formula for two years now does not occur to anyone.

We are ready for honest negotiations, as President Vladimir Putin said. True, he advised Zelensky's masters to first make him cancel the decree forbidding negotiations with the Putin government. But we are ready for negotiations on the understanding that they will be conducted based on the comprehensive consideration of our country's legitimate interests.