CIS Foreign Ministers Council meeting

Photo: MFA

Press release on CIS Foreign Ministers Council meeting.

On October 7, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov participated in a regular meeting of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers, hosted by Turkmenistan as the current Chair of the Commonwealth, in the Avaza National Tourist Zone of Turkmenistan.

Discussions covered a broad range of issues concerning cooperation within the CIS framework, including in the context of the organisation’s 35th anniversary, which is being marked this year. Plans were outlined for further strengthening foreign policy coordination and for enhancing the CIS international profile.

The participants engaged in a thorough exchange of views on global and regional developments. Sergey Lavrov set out Russia’s approach to a number of pressing issues, including the situation in and around Ukraine and the continuing tensions in the Middle East.

The ministers adopted a statement in support of practical steps to prevent an arms race in outer space. The 2027 Plan for Multi-Level Consultations between the CIS foreign ministries was endorsed.

Following the meeting, a package of decisions was adopted, aimed at deepening integration ties in the cultural and academic spheres, as well as in law enforcement and security.

Most of the documents reviewed will be submitted for adoption to the CIS Heads of State Council on October 9. Among them are draft statements on the 35th anniversary of the Commonwealth and on the preservation of historical memory.

The next meeting of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers will be held in Bishkek in April 2027.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement and answers to media questions following a meeting of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers

Good afternoon,

A series of meetings sponsored by the CIS and the Caspian Group of Five have taken place over the past few days in Avaza, a resort built by our Turkmen friends on the Caspian coast.

Today’s work started with bilateral talks with my counterpart, Deputy Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers and Foreign Minister of Turkmenistan Rashid Meredov. We focused primarily on deepening strategic partnership, which we place a special emphasis on following the instructions of our respective leaders, who stay in communication to discuss a variety of matters.

Next year will mark the 35th anniversary of Russia-Turkmenistan diplomatic relations, which is why today we agreed to draft an action plan that will include holding exhibitions, releasing archival documents, and holding cultural events.

Foreign policy matters that need the attention of our presidents will be reported to Vladimir Putin and Serdar Berdimuhamedov.

We discussed preparations for the CIS Heads of State Council, which will open tomorrow evening with a formal reception. Its main proceedings will take place on Friday. That same day, the summit will be followed by a summit of the Caspian Group of Five on environmental issues.

CIS parliamentary events chaired by Turkmenistan are being held concurrently. Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko is taking part in them.

Mr Meredov and I gave high assessment of our cooperation across all areas. We attach particular importance to expanding economic, investment, and trade ties. The Intergovernmental Russia-Turkmenistan Commission on Economic Cooperation will hold a meeting before the end of this year.

We discussed educational, cultural, and humanitarian ties focusing on flagship projects such as the establishment of the Russian-Turkmen University, the construction of an additional building for the Alexander Pushkin Russian-Turkmen School in Ashgabat, and the regular holding of Days of Culture.

We share the view that historical memory must be preserved, especially at a time when Europe is clearly taking the resurgence of Nazism lightly, while it is rearing its ugly head in a number of countries with the acquiescence of their ruling circles.

In this context, we reaffirmed our commitment to preserving historical memory. In particular, we approved plans to build a Friendship monument in Ashgabat as a gesture of gratitude to the city’s residents, who showed hospitality by taking in residents of besieged Leningrad during the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War.

We discussed the international agenda, including CIS cooperation in the Caspian region. We proposed expanding relations between Turkmenistan and the Eurasian Economic Union. We also invited Turkmenistan to join the work on the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century spearheaded by Belarus and the Russian Federation.

We launched the drafting of this document at a meeting of foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York. In addition to Russia and Belarus, the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan took part in that meeting.

Deputy Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers and Foreign Minister of Turkmenistan Rashid Meredov and I signed a ministerial cooperation plan for the next two years.

Following our bilateral meeting, a meeting of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers was held, which we used to review issues to be submitted for discussion and approval by the heads of state. As I mentioned earlier, the summit will take place on Friday.

A statement by the CIS heads of state dedicated to the 35th anniversary of the Commonwealth is a key document. The statement provides an assessment of the situation in global politics and the global economy and sets out areas for deepening cooperation and integration processes.

More documents have been prepared for the Council of Heads of State, including a statement on preserving historical memory. To reiterate, this issue has always been high on our countries’ list of priorities.

A programme for implementing the Concept for a Common Educational Space for 2027-2035 has been approved. Decisions were adopted to hold a CIS film festival, at Kazakhstan’s initiative, and to promote an objective image of the CIS and its member states in the global media space at the initiative of our Tajik friends. We focused special attention on youth cooperation, tourism, physical fitness, and sports. Draft action plans were adopted.

There are also initiatives that were included in the draft documents submitted for consideration by the summit participants, such as Russia’s initiative to designate 2027 as the Year of Legal Education, as well as our Turkmen colleagues’ initiative to designate 2029 as the Year of Transport Connectivity. This is a very important process which directly correlates with an initiative put forward by President Vladimir Putin several years ago to establish a Greater Eurasian Partnership. Transport and logistics connectivity across Eurasia is one of the key objectives of this initiative.

A draft Concept for promoting cooperation in combatting crimes involving information and communications technologies was approved, as were the Guidelines for Information Policy in the Border Sphere. This is also an important aspect of our cooperation, given the need to make border crossings for legitimate purposes as convenient as possible for our citizens.

The restricted-attendance meeting participants discussed international issues at length, including the developments in the Middle East, the Gulf region, and the Arabian Peninsula at large. We discussed the impact of deep-seated crises on the global economy. In this context, we emphasised the need to promote cooperation within the CIS and, more broadly, across Eurasia, which enjoys all the necessary conditions for expanding interaction without relying on undependable forms of payments and transport.

We provided assessments of the current developments surrounding the Ukraine crisis and thanked our partners for their understanding of the need to remove the underlying causes. We spoke about building architecture of equal and indivisible security, including by involving our colleagues in work on the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity, which I mentioned before.

We reaffirmed our view that the decision adopted in 2025 to establish cooperation in the CIS+ format holds a lot of promise. It implies the participation of the stakeholders, primarily our neighbours, in the CIS activities. In this context, we cited as the first example the upcoming participation of President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian in the CIS summit on October 9.

The implementation of Kazakhstan’s initiative to establish an International Organisation for the Russian Language is another example of work within the CIS+ format. It builds on the CIS and was put forward by President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. It is now open to any stakeholder country. We proposed, and welcomed with gratitude, the agreement of all our colleagues to adopt a Foreign Ministers’ Statement on preventing an arms race in outer space. We also signed a Plan of Consultations among CIS countries on a broad range of issues. We supported Turkmenistan’s proposal to promote, during the current session of the UN General Assembly, a resolution on cooperation between the CIS and the UN.

Question: Does the CIS format continue to stand as other associations are taking center stage in Eurasia, and differences persist among individual CIS member states?

Sergey Lavrov: I wouldn’t describe them as differences. There are positions that never overlap 100 percent in any body or between any two countries in any region of the world. There are specific national interests, and there is diplomatic culture of balancing those interests out. That is exactly what we were busy doing today at the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. There were differing opinions, but we reached agreement on all items listed on today’s agenda.

With regard to the CIS as an organisation located in Eurasia, a continent that is also home to other organisations, this is precisely what we are talking about when we advance President Putin’s initiative to establish a Greater Eurasian Partnership in Eurasia which is the largest and richest one-of-a-kind continent that is home to several thousand-year-old civilisations. Nothing compares to that in Africa or Latin America. They have their own centuries-old histories but the civilisational mix that includes China, India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia is truly unparalleled. With all these historical and contemporary factors in mind, we will look for ways to bring our positions closer together.

The CIS, the EAEU, the GCC, the OPEC, ASEAN, and the cooperation entity in the Indian subcontinent all seek to promote cooperation in areas such as the economy, transport, and connectivity. The idea of creating a Greater Eurasian Partnership is based on the premise that relations should be established among all these entities in order to create a rational division of labour and make their programmes and projects complementary.

There are agreements at the secretariat level among the CIS, the EAEU, and the SCO. This is the first step towards harmonising programmes. ASEAN is also about to join this effort.

Importantly, all sub-regional entities in Eurasia are invited to cooperate in this area, which is already gaining momentum and is open to individual countries that are not members of any association.

This is not an easy task, given the multitude of views, assessments, ideas, and initiatives. But that is precisely what diplomacy and foreign policy are for - to bring together different initiatives that, in many respects, are moving in the same direction and to find common ground among them.

Question: Is deeper integration among Eurasian formats such as the CIS, the SCO, ASEAN, and the EAEU being discussed? If so, what format or form it may take?

Sergey Lavrov: I mentioned earlier that there are memoranda of cooperation between the CIS and the EAEU secretariats, the CIS and the SCO, the SCO and ASEAN, and the EAEU and ASEAN, and regular contacts take place. The heads of these secretariats visit one another. The countries chairing the respective organisations exchange visits. During these contacts, they exchange general assessments of the situation in order to compare them, and coordinate possible joint actions taking into account the medium- and long-term programmes of each of these organisations.

Again, this is not a straightforward process, given not only the scale and size of the Eurasian continent, but also its history and the multitude of civilisational foundations in this geopolitical space.

The work is underway. Moscow was not built in one day. I have no doubt that neither Eurasian security nor the Eurasian economic space will be built overnight, but they will be built steadily and with determination.

Question: Not long ago, Vladimir Zelensky said the United States had proposed holding trilateral talks between Russia, the United States, and Ukraine before the end of October, and that Kiev had supported the proposal. Has Moscow received a proposal to this end? What are the chances of moving from an exchange of policy statements to specific agreements?

Sergey Lavrov: Officials from the Presidential Executive Office, Dmitry Peskov and Yury Ushakov, the Foreign Ministry and, most importantly, President Putin have commented on this issue. The President has repeatedly and openly made it clear, most recently at the Valdai Forum, that the Americans had proposed holding such talks and that Moscow had agreed, with the understanding that we first needed to hold elections, after which we would focus on discussing the timing, the venue, the agenda, and other details.

President Putin pointed out that shortly after we responded to the US proposal, the Kiev regime began doing everything in its power to disrupt the State Duma elections. During all three days of the voting campaign, an unprecedented number of terrorist attacks were carried out against civilian targets, including polling stations with precinct election commissions. Particularly heavy raids took place on September 20, injuring several people and killing one. We made it clear that given the circumstances, we need to have an idea of the proposals Vladimir Zelensky’s negotiators will bring to the table. This is critically important to us. The US side duly noted our arguments and was receptive of them.

As for moving from statements towards specific work, that question should be addressed to someone other than us. Starting in February 2014, when the EU solemnly guaranteed the agreement between then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition, and the opposition trampled on those “solemn guarantees” and carried out a coup the following morning, we supported specific decisions and took part in drafting them. When we started pressing those guarantors into taking action and asking them to raise their voices in defence, if not of justice, then at least of their own signatures on the settlement document, we were rather sheepishly told that, apparently, it was not working out and that “democracy had prevailed.”

That was followed by the 2015 Minsk Agreements approved by the UN Security Council – I could go on and on down that list – and the Paris agreements of December 2019, which reaffirmed the Minsk Agreements. These were not statements, but concrete decisions signed by the Kiev regime and its sponsors, including those in Berlin and Paris.

That was followed by the Istanbul negotiations in April 2022 which unfolded according to the same scenario. The Ukrainians themselves proposed a draft and the settlement principles. We accepted the draft and initialed it as did the Ukrainians. Then that same Europe was unable to talk sense into then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who, in fact, told the Ukrainian side to walk away from the settlement plan it had itself proposed.

That was followed by bilateral talks with the Ukrainians in Istanbul, which they broke off when we proposed broadening the agenda and organising it around three areas - humanitarian, military and political - and also significantly raising the level of the delegation. All of that took place in 2025. Ukraine broke off the process without explanation. There were trilateral talks involving the United States, Russia, and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi. Those, too, were broken off through no fault of ours.

So, our conscience is clear. Not to mention the fact that we fully accepted the proposals made by the United States in August 2025 during the Alaska summit between President Putin and President Trump. It is not our fault that the Americans were unable to withstand unprecedented and brazen pressure from Europe, which later proudly declared that it had “buried Anchorage.”

So, I hope you will have an opportunity to address these questions to the people I just mentioned in describing these dramatic events.

Thank you.

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