Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s opening remarks at a meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia and the Alliance of Sahel States, Moscow, April 3, 2025

Friends,

I am delighted to welcome you and your delegations to the capital of Russia. We are grateful to you for accepting our invitation to this meeting.

Russia and your countries maintain intensive contacts. The last time we had an opportunity to hold in-depth discussions with each of you was during the First Ministerial Conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum held in Sochi in November 2024.

Today’s meeting is especially important. It is the first time that it is being held in the quadripartite format between Russia and three countries of the Alliance of Sahel States. The establishment of your Alliance is evidence of your countries’ commitment to pursuing independent policies and building a new regional security architecture with reliance on your own forces, while remaining open to cooperation with the countries that are focused on equal interaction based on mutual respect and mutual advantage.

We are delighted to see the dynamic development of integration processes within the Alliance. This offers additional opportunities for strengthening our interaction in trade, the economy, investment, transport and logistics, as well as cooperation between our banks.

We have reached the first results in cooperation in several areas with each of your countries. According to conservative estimates, they are positive, but this is only the beginning. We must continue working to take our relations to a fundamentally new level, just like we did with coordinating our efforts on the international stage to ensure security and train civilian and military personnel for the humanitarian sphere.

There is no doubt that this meeting will help strengthen the entire range of our mutual relations. We are also ready to discuss promising areas for promoting not only bilateral relations but also our ties with the Alliance of Sahel States as an organisation, and to exchange views on promoting our interaction at the subregional level with due regard for the realities of your trilateral cooperation. We believe that these efforts should be focused on maintaining and strengthening political sovereignty, security and economic development interests of your Alliance.

Active work in this new format will undoubtedly add momentum to bilateral cooperation and make a substantial contribution to the further development of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum at the level of foreign ministers, which was established by decision of the second Russia-Africa Summit, which took place in St Petersburg in 2023. The first ministerial meeting of the Forum, which was established by decision of our heads of state, was held in November 2024. We have agreed that the second meeting between the foreign ministers of the African Union countries and Russia will be held in Africa in 2025.

I hope that the African Union will come up with proposals on the date and site of this meeting soon. It will be a major stage in preparations for the third Russia-Africa Summit scheduled for 2026.