Russian MFA 🇷🇺 - Overview

#Opinion by Maria Zakharova Annalena Baerbock on the OSCE Ministerial Council: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appears in the hall only when he speaks himself, not to listen to others.” 💬 For some reason, a year ago, she was not worried that Sergey Lavrov did not appear in the hall at all, because the Polish chair did not invite Russia to the meeting. It is a pity she did not say before how much she was looking forward to gazing upon Lavrov in the hall. Surely then, out of compassion for her, the NATO countries would not have prevented the Russian delegation from attending international forums. If you have a chance, please tell Annalena that all remarks at the ministerial meetings are broadcast online. It is possible to listen to all of them in any part of the globe. But you have to be in the hall to make a speech.

✍️ Article for the International Affairs magazine by Director of the Foreign Policy Planning Department Alexey Drobinin Why is choosing traditional values so important? 💬 Russia, as well as other countries, has launched and is conducting an in-depth revision of ideas that were assimilated, at first glance. These ideas largely shaped the economic, political & cultural world that emerged after the Cold War. Without renouncing science & technological progress, the advantages of participating in the international division of labour, we are discarding the gloomy wraith of perceptions and ideological concepts adopted in the well-known historical environment of the late 1980s and the 1990s. Russia is once again facing foreign attempts to hamper its development. One of the main directions of attack comes in the form of the Western values agenda. 👉 It would be appropriate to analyse the paradigm of neo-liberal values in greater detail and to divide it into four tentative aspects: Economics 🔻 dominance of the US dollar; 🔻 commodities and sales markets that are open to Western capital; 🔻 eco-extremism. Politics 🔻 power by a minority of society over the rest of it; 🔻 “free and fair” elections; 🔻 distort the concept of human rights; 🔻 total control by IT giants over public opinion. Society 🔻 decriminalisation and legalisation of drug use; 🔻 LGBT agenda; 🔻 radical feminism; 🔻 “critical race theory”. Technology 🔻 promoting individualism; 🔻 technological permissiveness; 🔻 biomedicine. ❗️The entire neoliberal agenda is, in one way or another, a product of big money, designed to serve the interests of transnational corporations through political, economic, and social shackles. <...> The goal of the intellectual and political community, which cares about the future of its own people, is to identify & consistently neutralise any threats to the original way of life and traditional values, which are crucial to Russia’s full-scale and successful development in the 21st century. Read in full

🇷🇺🇰🇿 On 30 November, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met briefly with Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan Murat Nurtleu on the sidelines of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Skopje. They discussed topical issues on the bilateral and regional agendas in the context of the outcome of President Vladimir Putin's official visit to the Republic of Kazakhstan on November 9, as well as the development of cooperation between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Kazakhstan in the OSCE and other international platforms.

🎙 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks during the 30th meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council (November 30, 2023) Key points: • In just over a year, the Helsinki Final Act will mark its 50th anniversary. Regrettably, the OSCE is approaching this milestone in a lamentable condition, and its prospects remain uncertain. • Unfortunately, Western political elites appropriated the role of rulers of humanity’s destiny and made a shortsighted choice in favour of NATO rather than the OSCE. They embraced a philosophy of containment, geopolitical zero-sum games, and the leader-follower logic. The bloc’s reckless expansion to the East, which started after the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, was a key component of this approach. • The genuine intentions of the Western politicians again revealed themselves when Washington and Brussels rejected Russia’s December 2021 proposals on legally binding security guarantees in Europe. • In a bid to crush the Russian economy, the United States and its European satellites have introduced thousands of anti-Russia sanctions, thereby making impossible any significant East-West practical cooperation in what was once our common region. • The Kiev regime is Washington’s investment into its egoistic interests of deterring Russia and resolving its own problems at the expense of others. This applies to the removal of economic competitors, primarily the EU. • The current situation is a direct consequence of the persistent attempts by our Western neighbours to ensure their dominance, as they shamelessly use the OSCE to aggressively push through their self-serving interests and consciously undermine the fundamental principle of consensus and the culture of diplomacy. • There are no particular reasons to be optimistic now. Essentially, the OSCE is being reformatted to become an appendage of NATO and the EU. This organisation (let’s face it) is on the brink of the abyss. ❓ Hence, a simple question: Does it make any sense to invest in any effort to revive it? Read in full

🇷🇺🇭🇺 On November 30, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov met with Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto as part of the 30th Meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Skopje. The Ministers compared positions on a wide range of practical issues of bilateral cooperation with a focus on the implementation of the agreements confirmed in Beijing on October 17, 2023 during the meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban. They exchanged views on key issues related to OSCE activities and topical international problems, including the situation in Ukraine.

🇷🇺🇦🇲 On November 30, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov had a brief conversation with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, Ararat Mirzoyan, on the sidelines of the OSCE Ministerial Council meeting in Skopje. The Foreign Ministers discussed topical issues on the bilateral agenda, as well as cooperation on international platforms and in common integration associations. There was an exchange of views on regional issues. The Russian side reaffirmed its readiness to vigorously promote Armenian-Azerbaijani normalisation on the basis of the set of trilateral agreements signed by the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020-2022, including efforts to conclude a peace treaty between Yerevan and Baku. The Ministers confirmed the need for further contacts at various levels.

Russian MFA Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: 💬 This is the first time in our history that instead of closing its airspace to a plane, a government has... prohibited a person from being on board this plane while it crosses its airspace. This is how far Russia haters have gone in their malicious stupidity. But this is what we read in an official statement from the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry: Yes, you can cross Bulgaria’s airspace, but Maria Zakharova cannot be aboard that plane. However, it does not say whether I can fly over Bulgaria in any other way other than by boarding a plane or whether I can travel through outer space for that purpose. On a more serious note, there is more than just stupidity here. In fact, this constitutes a dangerous and stupid move by some wire-puller within the Bulgarian government. After all, it is the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation that governs air travel. It defines state territory as “the land areas and territorial waters adjacent thereto.” Air space is not covered by this definition. Therefore, the already illegal European Union sanctions cannot be applied to a person who is banned from entering a country’s territory while this person is on a plane during a non-stop flight over that state’s territory. Have Bulgarian officials considered the fact that we could retaliate by giving the same treatment to thousands of NATO officials designated on our retaliatory stop lists? Have they thought about the dangerous international precedent this could set? I don’t think so. Who gave these illiterate officials in Sofia the authority to discredit the people of Bulgaria this way? PS. By the way, we are in Skopje 👋

🇷🇺🇰🇿 Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan Murat Nurtleu hold talks on the sidelines of the OSCE Ministerial Council 📍 Skopje, November 30, 2023

Russian MFA Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: 💬 This here, on these very desks, is a clear manifestation of what Sergey Lavrov mentioned in his statement at the plenary session of the OSCE Ministerial Council: under the pressure from the US the logic of the OSCE is being replaced by the aggressive ideology of NATO. 📷 © Maria Zakharova

🤝 Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov takes part in the first Plenary Session of the OSCE Ministerial Council 📍 Skopje, November 30, 2023