The country has friends who refuse to take orders from Western elites, the top diplomat said
FILE PHOTO: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov takes part in the unveiling of a statue of the poet Alexander Pushkin in Caracas, Venezuela. © Telegram / Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova
Attempts by the US and its allies to impose economic and diplomatic isolation on Russia have failed, partly due to support from Moscow’s genuine friends around the world, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Speaking at a meeting of the International Russophile Movement on Tuesday – the second such event hosted by Moscow, bringing together supporters of Russia including government officials from 130 countries – the foreign minister told participants that they have helped to counter Western pressure.
”Russia in fact has many true time-tested friends around the world, including in the US and Europe. They not only show an interest in us, but share the values that we promote, which all world religions and civilizations have in common,” Lavrov said.
”It seems natural that the destructive line of Western elites to isolate Russia, including in the global informational and cultural spaces, and the general drive to ‘cancel’ everything even remotely connected to our nation have suffered a complete failure,” he added.
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The minister said the Western punitive campaign involves lying to the world about Russian policies and goals – but that most people are more interested in facts than in propaganda myths, and realize that attempts to prohibit cooperation with Russia “stop no one but those who initiated them.”
Washington’s inability to turn Moscow into an international pariah was acknowledged last week in a New York Times article. The piece said US support for Israel’s war in Gaza is among the factors undermining Washington’s case, since “many leaders see hypocrisy in American condemnations” of Russian tactics in the Ukraine conflict. They are “unmoved by the argument that Israel works to avoid civilian casualties while Russia has deliberately targeted innocents.”
Moscow’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia commented on the situation in Gaza during a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday, describing the latest reports as “terrifying.” UN data suggests that some 600,000 people in the Palestinian enclave are facing death from hunger, he said, stressing that availability of food was not the issue.
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”Truckloads of aid are ready to leave promptly for Rafah. But Israel’s heavy-handed measures have resulted in just the opposite,” Nebenzia stated.
”You should be ashamed of comparing the situations in Ukraine and in Gaza,” the diplomat said, responding to a remark by the US delegation.
