The article beginning below, under the byline of Russsa’s foreign minister, appeared four days ago in the Russian magazine Razvedchik, two days ago in the Venezuela-based Oronoco Tribune, and was linked today in the daily Popular Resistance selection. — MCM
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Russian diplomacy in a changing world
It is a privilege for me to submit this article to Razvedchik news magazine and share with its readers my understanding of the current international developments, as well as Russia’s foreign policy priorities.
We live at a time of historic geopolitical shifts. “The change of eras is a painful albeit natural and inevitable process. A future world arrangement is taking shape before our eyes,” President Vladimir Putin said.
Today, the emerging multipolarity constitutes a key trend in international affairs, as I have noted on multiple occasions. New centres of power in Eurasia, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America have achieved impressive results in various areas, guided by their commitment to self-reliance, state sovereignty, and their unique cultural and civilisational identities. They have an independent foreign policy, which prioritises their core national interests. This puts in place objective factors for the emergence of a new multipolar world order — a more resilient, just, and democratic framework reflecting the natural and inalienable right of every nation to determine its future, as well as choose its own internal and socioeconomic development models.
By the way, there are politicians in the West who are beginning to come to terms with this reality, even if reluctantly. For example, President of France Emmanuel Macron has talked about the end of the Western hegemony in international affairs on multiple occasions, even if, truth be told, all this happened before he joined the ranks of the pro-Ukrainian coalition engineered by Washington for countering Russia. It is a separate matter that a correct diagnosis may not necessarily translate into practice or reshape foreign policy thinking based on the principles of international law, equal and indivisible security. On the contrary, the U.S.-led so-called collective West is doing everything to revive the unipolar model, which has run its course. They want to force the world to live in a Western-centric rules-based order that they invented themselves, while seeking to punish those who disagree with these rules, even if no one has ever seen them and they are nowhere to be found.
We never had any illusions as to who we are dealing with. It was clear to us that after the Cold War ended, Washington and its NATO satellites sought total hegemony and wanted to resolve their own development challenges at the expense of others. In the Euro-Atlantic, NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion became an integral part of this selfish policy, carried out despite the political promises that were given to the Soviet leadership not to expand NATO, as well as contrary to the commitments approved at the highest level within the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] to refrain from seeking to reinforce one’s security at the expense of security of other states.
The OSCE and Russia-NATO summits adopted multiple resolutions proclaiming that no single group of states or organisation can bear primary responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the region, or to view any part of the region as its sphere of influence, but these documents have been trampled upon. All these years, NATO has been moving in an opposite direction.
For years, the West persisted in its efforts to penetrate the post-Soviet geopolitical space and to build the so-called axis of instability along the Russian border. The United States and NATO countries have always viewed Ukraine as one of the tools they could use against Russia. To complete the transformation of our neighbouring state into an anti-Russia, the Western . . . READ MORE . . .