Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the Russian-Tajik Slavonic University, Dushanbe, June 6, 2023

Friends,

I am delighted to have an opportunity to visit this building once again and address this audience. I know that young diplomats, students and representatives of Tajikistan’s expert and academic circles have gathered here today. I would like to thank the senior management of the Russian-Tajik Slavonic University, an institution that is rightly considered to be a flagship of cooperation between our countries when it comes to education and research.

I consider this meeting to be another confirmation of a high level of trust between our countries. Russia and Tajikistan are united by relations of strategic partnership and alliance. I am satisfied to acknowledge that, despite the current geopolitical situation, the bilateral links continue to develop in a steadfast and dynamic manner.

We do have much to offer to the public. Our intensive political dialogue is progressing, in particular at the high and highest levels. It is hard to overestimate the importance of personal contacts between our presidents, who regularly exchange visits and messages, meet on the sidelines of multilateral events and speak on the phone. We highly appreciate the fact that on May 9, President Emomali Rahmon visited Moscow to attend the events marking the 78th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

For many years, Russia has maintained the status of the main trade partner of the Republic of Tajikistan. As of 2022, Russia-Tajikistan trade grew by almost 20 percent and in January and February of 2023 by more than 100 percent year-on-year.

Important, full-scale cooperation is developing in culture and humanitarian affairs, primarily in education. In view of the growing demand, branches of Russian universities opened in Tajikistan and applicants are selected based on Russian Government quotas. On September 1, 2022, our presidents issued a video address marking the opening of five new schools with Russian-language programmes teaching according to Russian education standards, in Dushanbe, Khujand, Kulob, Bokhtar, and Tursunzoda. Another successful project is assigning our teachers to work in this country under the Russian Teacher Abroad Programme. Seventy-four Russian teachers from different Russian regions currently teach in the republic.

Foreign policy is an integral aspect of our cooperation. We are grateful to our Tajikistani partners for their traditionally allied support of Russia’s initiatives. Our diplomats always respond in kind.

We closely coordinate our security and defence efforts both bilaterally and within multilateral organisations. This coordination helps to maintain stability not only in Tajikistan but also throughout Central Asia and its direct environment.

Russia promotes interstate ties based solely on the principles of the UN Charter, honesty, equality, respect for the cultural and civilisational diversity of the modern world, and the peoples’ right to decide their destiny on their own. And therein lies the core, fundamental difference from the collective West that links progress in relations to the acceptance of its dubious norms, standards, and values. There are numerous instances of attempts by our Western colleagues to rehash the domestic political systems in other countries along their policies, including through “colour revolutions” and other unlawful regime change schemes. The consequences of this were and are still felt by the citizens of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and many other states in different parts of the world.

Hoping to resuscitate the neocolonial, single-pole model of international order, Washington and its allies have placed themselves above the goals and principles of the UN Charter. They have pushed them aside as useless. And now they have conceived the idea of replacing the UN-centric architecture itself with a “rules-based order” of their own making. No one has seen those “rules” that are not legally binding by definition. Judging by all appearances, the Western leaders have forgotten that the key principle of the United Nations Charter is sovereign equality of all states regardless of the size of the territory, population, form of government, or political or socioeconomic system. The West is grossly violating this principle of sovereign equality of states, dividing the world into “democracies” and “autocracies,” or “autocratic regimes.” If we call things by their proper names, the division is into the “select few” that are allowed to do whatever they please and into the “others” that have to follow the “golden billion” and cater to its interests. The essence of US policy, now that the United States has brought to heel all of Europe, is this: they have the right to do whatever they want and the rest – only what they are allowed.

Today, we see the West’s purpose-oriented attempts to aggressively penetrate Central Asia, including with a cultural agenda and militarily. The “development assistance” programmes promoted by Western “geopolitical engineers” are in fact control tools designed to reformat the region’s political and economic landscape as they see fit, including (we discussed this today during talks with Foreign Minister of Tajikistan Sirojiddin Muhriddin) in the key area of water use. We call on our friends to display a critical attitude towards military cooperation schemes and law enforcement training programmes that are being imposed by the West.  

The years-long eastern expansion pursued by the military bloc known as NATO has become an inalienable part of the course for achieving a global hegemony, which has been followed by Washington and its allies. In so doing, they have breached their promises to not expand the North Atlantic alliance, which they gave the USSR years ago. Later they disregarded our repeated appeals to deliver on the commitments the West and all others assumed at the OSCE summits in Istanbul in 1990 and Astana in 2010, commitments not to strengthen one’s own security at the expense of the security of others and not to allow any country or organisation to aspire to domination in our common region.   

Nevertheless, we continued to press for a political and diplomatic agreement on reliable security guarantees, but Washington and NATO haughtily dragged out the relevant initiatives that President Vladimir Putin put forward in December 2021 and continued preparing the Kiev regime, which seized power in a bloody coup in February 2014, for a further onslaught against the vital interests of the Russian Federation.

A little while back, the Western political elite saw Ukraine as a pawn in their geopolitical game and a tool to contain our country. For years, they kept nurturing that neo-Nazi and openly Russophobic regime and drawing it into NATO. They nudged it to use a forceful solution to the “problem” of Donbass in circumvention of the Minsk Agreements, which were unanimously approved by UN Security Council Resolution 2202. Just look at the cynical confessions by former leader of Germany Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande about the 2015 Minsk Agreements of February 2015. The agreements were approved by the Security Council but all they needed them for was to buy time for Kiev to build up its military capacity against Russia. According to the UN Charter, all Security Council resolutions, especially those that are approved unanimously, are binding. This illustrates the inability of the criminal Kiev regime and its Western masters to negotiate.

After many years of lies and deception, we were left with no choice but to launch the special military operation to eliminate the threat to Russia's national security, to protect Russians and Russian speakers from extermination and the ethnic and language purges on lands that have been inhabited by their ancestors for centuries, where their forefathers built cities, ports, and factories. The corresponding decision was based on Article 51 of the UN Charter that provides for the right to individual or collective self-defence, after the people's republics of Donbass asked Russia for assistance on the basis of bilateral agreements of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance. As President Putin said when answering a question: “Russia was forced to respond to the war unleashed by the Ukrainian regime in Donbass.”

More than once, I have conveyed from various rostrums that the developments in Ukraine were just a sliver of the conflict over the future of the international order. Today, the question is whether the world order will be truly fair, democratic and multipolar, or whether a small group of states will retain their ability to impose their will on other countries and resolve their own problems at the expense of others. To live at the expense of others is the principle that colonisers live by.

The vast majority of the Global South and the Global East countries, referred to as the Global Majority, are fully aware of the fateful nature of the current period. They are primarily led by their fundamental interests. Our allies, like-minded partners and friends living on our common and vast Eurasian continent are among them.

Speaking to this audience, I would like to emphasise that expanding cooperation with our neighbours and friends in the near abroad remains our priority and is enshrined in Russia’s revised Foreign Policy Concept which President Putin approved in late March. The dynamics of interaction within the CIS are positive and there for everyone to see. New major initiatives, including in the cultural and humanitarian sphere, are being put forward. We are supportive of the project advanced by President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to create an international organisation for Russian language studies under the CIS, but open to any other country in the world. The Commonwealth of Independent States is a convenient platform for holding talks on forming a new international multilateral entity.

A few days from now, an agreement on trade in services will be signed at a meeting of the heads of CIS governments.  It has been in the works for a long time now. The agreement will promote trade liberalisation within the Commonwealth.

The integration processes within the EAEU are deepening. This project has proven its relevance and sustainability. The positive results of cooperation within EAEU, primarily the noticeable increase in mutual trade, are clear evidence of this. Today, this common market includes more than 180 million consumers and ensures the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

Russia is chairing the EAEU this year, and it is emphasising building dialogues with interested third countries and other international associations. This certainly includes our Tajikistani friends. Statistics support the good prospects for Tajikistan's rapprochement with the EAEU. According to the Eurasian Development Bank, in 2022, the EAEU accounted for 44 percent of Tajikistan’s foreign trade.

The Collective Security Treaty Organisation remains one of the main and most effective tools for ensuring stability and military-political cooperation in our region. Today, the CSTO is an established international association that not only contributes to the greater security of its member states, but also has a positive impact on the situation in Eurasia. Its effectiveness was fully manifested in January 2022 when it deployed a peacekeeping mission to Kazakhstan at the request of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

Russian-Tajikistani cooperation includes regular military exercises under the CSTO as well as measures to strengthen the protection of Tajikistan's southern borders. This is especially relevant amid constant threats from Afghanistan. I discussed this today with President of the Republic of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan Sirojiddin Muhriddin as well as during yesterday's visit to the 201st Russian military base.

We have established close and trust-based cooperation with Dushanbe on Afghanistan issues, both at the bilateral level and at multilateral regional platforms, including the Moscow Format Consultations on Afghanistan, the CSTO, the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, as well as the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan mechanism. Our approaches coincide on many fundamental issues on the Afghanistan agenda such as the need to create an inclusive government in that country (not only ethnically, but also politically), fighting threats emanating from Afghanistan, migration and human rights issues.

In our view, building a working dialogue with the Taliban as the single dominant internal political force in Afghanistan meets the interests of the region’s security and economic development, as well as intra-Afghan national reconciliation. We continue to push the current authorities in Kabul in this direction. However, until these conditions are met, we cannot discuss the beginning of the official recognition process of the Taliban government. The commitments I am referring to include the formation of an ethnically and politically balanced government, stepping up measures to combat terrorism and drug trafficking, and ensuring basic human rights for all people living in Afghanistan, including Tajiks.

In our meetings with representatives of the Taliban, and we have regular contact with them, we encourage them to accelerate the solution to these problems, which were announced to the whole world.

We consistently insist that Washington and its allies, who are directly responsible for the critical situation that has developed in that country over the inglorious 20-year presence of NATO occupation forces, should bear the main financial costs of the post-conflict reconstruction of the Afghan economy. At the same time, returning the US and NATO military infrastructure to Afghan territory or deploying it in any of the neighbouring states under any pretext is absolutely unacceptable.

Colleagues, friends.

I would like to emphasise that no one will be able to drive a wedge between our countries – and many are trying to do this. The centuries-old friendship between our fraternal peoples is the key to further deepening and expanding the comprehensive and mutually beneficial Russian-Tajikistani partnership and alliance. This friendship will only grow stronger. I hope that everyone here will make a contribution to this common noble cause, each in their own place.