РУССКИЙ
21:17 28.05.2025 •
Photo: MFA
Moscow, May 28, 2025
“Mr Shoigu,
Colleagues,
High guests,
It is a great honour and privilege for me to take the floor at the plenary session of the 13th International Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues, and to share with you our Ministry’s vision, tell you about our work in the context of the vibrant processes unfolding around the world, and the way we have been acting on the instructions we receive from the President of the Russian Federation and in keeping with his assessments and directives.
It is rejoicing that your forum has become a regular event and has been attracting a lot of attention and interest from around the world, even among those who are not represented here – in fact, they can be even more interested than many others. This reflects the objective historical trend, which consists of the Global Majority becoming increasingly aware of the need to have a place it deserves in international affairs.
There are many people in this room representing the Global South and East. These countries are becoming increasingly vocal when discussing and addressing the most urgent and key challenges the world is facing today. This reflects a tectonic shift in international politics, which took place over the past years and continues to this day. It primarily consists of an accelerated emergence of a multipolar world order, as well as new centres of development across the Eurasian continent, Africa and Latin America taking on a bigger role in the global distribution of power.
The West has started to recognise this new objective reality. However, instead of approaching these developments as an objective reality, there are quite a few people in the United States and especially in Europe who view multipolarity as a challenge or even a threat rather than something good. They view it as something threatening their infamous rules-based order, i.e., a framework the West has been trying to impose in the aftermath of the Cold War in the pursuit of its selfish interests. They have been acting in bad faith in an effort to impose a narrative describing the multipolar world order as nothing short of chaos or a war of all against all.
We cannot agree with a vision of this kind. It fails to reflect the actual state of affairs. We believe that these Western approaches are at odds with reality. For example, the West keeps talking about inevitable great power rivalry or even clashes between them. This idea fails the reality test. Take the relations between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, which are two neighbouring great powers. Leaders of China and the Russian Federation believe that the centuries-old relations between their countries have been gathering positive momentum and have reached their all-time high. In terms of the nature of these relations, they go far beyond the usual alliances of the past and offer an advanced interaction framework.
Russia’s special privileged strategic partnership with another great Eurasian civilisation, India, is another case in point. My country also maintains mutually respectful, mutually beneficial and trust-based relations within BRICS, as well as dozens of other countries in the Global South and East willing to work with this grouping.
BRICS exemplifies constructive multilateral cooperation among major international actors and their partners representing various continents, cultures and religions. It has firmly established itself as one of the pillars of a multipolar world order and a champion of the Global Majority on the international stage.
Upholding international law and seeking guidance from the principles of equality and neighbourly relations, as well as mutual respect and taking into account each other’s interests guarantees peace and stability. If we are serious about ensuring stability within the system of international relations, we must realise that much will depend on making the West renounce efforts to impose its destructive and illegitimate ideological tenets and start abiding by the principles set forth in the UN Charter in good faith. It must honour these principles in their entirety and interdependence, instead of adopting a selective approach. This is what Europe and the United States have grown used to doing having come to believe in their exceptionality and infallibility.
Multipolarity has cast a bright light on the wisdom of the UN founding fathers, who created that global organisation on the fundamental principle of the sovereign equality of states.
Compliance with that principle guarantees respect for the legitimate rights and national interests of all states regardless of their size, demographic and resource potential or strength. If we look at the chronology and history of conflicts, we will see that the West did not respect the sovereign equality of states in a single conflict or crisis after the UN was established on the basis of the unanimous approval of that principle. I repeat, not in a single of them. I invite you to look at leisure at the history of the conflicts over the past 80 years.
This Western position invariably provoked new crises in international relations. The West’s selective approach to the principles of the UN Charter manifested itself especially bluntly during the Ukraine crisis. We consider it unacceptable that the West and the leaders of the UN Secretariat and other international organisations are fixated on the principle of territorial integrity while completely disregarding the right of nations to self-determination.
I would like to remind everyone that the right of nations to self-determination provided the international legal basis for the process of decolonisation, which has brought freedom to a vast number of countries in Africa and other parts of the world.
The international community has provided an exhaustive answer to the deceptive legal collision between the principle of territorial integrity and the right of nations to self-determination. In 1970, following many years of discussions, the UN General Assembly adopted a consensus Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the UN Charter. Its relevant part clearly states that all countries must respect the territorial integrity of those countries whose governments respect the principle of self-determination and therefore represent the entire population residing within the borders of the territory in question. Does the Kiev regime, which launched a war against its own people after the February 2014 coup, represent the population of Crimea and the southeastern regions of Ukraine? Definitely not.
Likewise, in 1960s the London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Berlin and Brussels colonisers did not represent the interests of African peoples, who wanted their governments to be elected rather than imposed on them from abroad.
The same story took place after the state coup in large regions of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Nazi regime, which came to power after the state coup, has been trampling on the rights of Russians and Russian speakers for many years. Over the past years, starting in the middle of the 2010s, they have been waging an open legislative war of extermination against everything associated with the Russian World and Russia. They adopted laws categorically prohibiting the Russian language, culture, traditions and Russian-language media.
In 2024, they adopted a law banning canonical Orthodoxy, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This has grossly violated another fundamental principle of respect for human rights for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion, set out in Article 1 of the UN Charter. It is notable that the West likes to lecture the overwhelming majority of states represented here, with or without reason, on respect for human rights in the Western sense of the phrase.
Reread the statements on Ukraine made by Western leaders after the coup. They never mentioned the phrase “human rights” at all. Moreover, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, other Brussels functionaries and NATO officials are openly speaking about the need to increase aid to Ukraine because Ukraine is allegedly defending “European values.” It appears that European values boil down to eradicating national identities, in this instance, the Russian and Russian speaking people. Even in the Middle East, Israel has not prohibited Arabic in its territory, and Hebrew is not prohibited in the Palestinian territories.
The language policy is the same in other parts of the world where ethnic communities that do not mix well nevertheless live in peace with each other.
Most recently, EU Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos proudly announced that Ukraine had satisfied all preliminary requirements to commence accession negotiations with the European Union. These are the European values that in reality mean actual implementation of the ideology of Nazism.
At the initiative of US President Donald Trump, with support from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s leadership, we established direct contact with Ukrainian representatives. On May 16 in Istanbul, direct talks on all settlement-related issues resumed. While we had long been prepared for the talks, Ukraine previously declined to participate. It was also constrained to join the process by its masters, primarily in Europe. During these talks, we insisted on repealing all discriminatory legislation and will maintain this position in the next round of direct talks, which will be announced shortly.
I want to underscore that Russia has consistently – both in the years preceding the special military operation and after it started – proposed, and continues to propose, that the Ukrainian side settle all issues (which grow increasingly acute with every year) through dialogue and diplomacy. We are grateful to those governments that have facilitated the resumption of talks without preconditions.
Talks are better than war. But we remain profoundly convinced that success requires eliminating the root causes of this conflict, as President of Russia Vladimir Putin has consistently emphasised. I have just mentioned one such cause, which is the legislative deprivation of tens of millions of people of their right to their mother tongue, traditions, culture, faith, history and, finally, the memory of their ancestors who inhabited these lands for centuries, founded cities and industries, buildt ports, and developed these territories. Today, the Kiev regime is dismantling monuments, including those to Catherine the Great and her supporters who shaped eastern Ukraine, the modern southern Ukraine, as well as memorials to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War who liberated Ukraine and then Europe from the Nazi plague.
There is another equally critical root cause. This concerns the persistent efforts to drag Ukraine into NATO. As I have repeatedly stated, the conflict in Ukraine (and more fundamentally, the profound security crisis across Europe) was triggered precisely by NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion over decades that was in direct contravention of the solemn assurances by American and European leaders to both Soviet and Russian leadership regarding the alliance’s non-expansion.
The expansion represented a breach of these commitments (described by some as verbal agreements) and of the obligations endorsed at the highest level during the OSCE summits in Europe, the 1999 Istanbul summit and the 2010 Astana summit. The clear statement was, security must remain indivisible and equal, with no single nation or a group of nations permitted to claim dominance across the OSCE space.
NATO proceeded precisely as expressly prohibited. When we challenged our Western counterparts about their violation of the commitments made by their presidents and prime ministers, their response was, it had been merely a political declaration while legal security guarantees would be extended only to those who requested NATO membership. This demonstrates the hypocrisy and misrepresentation, without overstatement, that we have to confront.
Naturally, we were compelled to respond. As President of Russia Vladimir Putin has consistently emphasised, we have made repeated efforts to steer this situation toward negotiating an agreement on equal security, in order to secure this principle formally. However, the West refuses. Our most recent attempt was made in December 2021. Once again, as President Putin articulated, this left us with no alternative but to defend the legitimate security interests of the Russian Federation and safeguard the legitimate interests of the populations whom we had no right to abandon in the hands of the Kiev regime.
As for the NATO membership plans for Ukraine, I will remind you that the country’s neutral, non-aligned and nuclear-free status was solemnly proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence adopted in 1991. That commitment – the proclamation of a neutral, non-aligned and nuclear-free status for all time – has actually made it possible for the Russian Federation and all other members of the international community to recognise Ukraine as an independent state. A return to that commitment, which the Nazi regime in Kiev tried to violate (and even amended the Constitution to be able to change its nuclear-free status), is one of Russia’s key demands that must be met in any settlement agreement to be reached, as stipulated at the talks in Istanbul in April 2022, when this requirement was written down on paper before the negotiations were disrupted by the Anglo-Saxons and other masterminds of the war against Russia.
However, NATO does not seem to have learned any lessons from this whole situation. We are watching with concern as the alliance is reinforcing its contingents along the entire line of contact with Russia. Let me also note that this line became significantly longer when the once neutral Sweden and Finland joined the alliance. There is no way of knowing why they were suddenly discontented with their long-time neutral status.
Certain irresponsible politicians in Europe have become increasingly vocal calling on the population to tighten their belts and prepare for war with Russia. They are even mentioning specific dates, like 2027 or 2030. We were alarmed by a recent statement by the new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who pledged to turn Germany into what he called the leading military power in Europe again. This immediately reminded many people of the two periods in the 20th century when Germany indeed was the top military power in Europe – and what happened when it was, and how much grief it brought to the people in Europe and beyond.
As if that was not enough for NATO strategists, the alliance is now taking steps to operate outside its area of responsibility, seeking to move into the Asia-Pacific region – the Indo-Pacific, as they call it – threatening to undermine the ASEAN-centric security architecture that has developed there over decades and allowed the countries in the region and their partners in different parts of the world to successfully cooperate. This causes deep concern for the future of ASEAN and the future well-being of its member states.
When NATO officials like former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg are asked why a defensive alliance like NATO, which is officially aimed at defending the territory of its member states, would conceive such plans for the Asia-Pacific region, Stoltenberg answered without missing a beat that those plans are about defending the member states, because their territories are being threatened from the Indo-Pacific today – from the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and Southeast Asia.
You can see NATO deploying its military infrastructure there. This reflects in interaction between Washington and Seoul, which are planning certain measures, also with a nuclear component. You can see new three-party and four-party formats created there, such as South Korea-Japan-New Zealand and Australia. They are trying to extend the AUKUS arrangement to other closed bloc-type configurations and are openly trying to pull certain member countries away from ASEAN and make them part of their reckless narrow-bloc initiatives in that region.
We are ready to show solidarity with our ASEAN friends in every possible way in upholding the architecture that was approved at the East Asia summits, and which they are now trying to destroy. Practical experience shows that if NATO approaches you, you must expect trouble. The former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and many other countries remember it all too well.
Particular concern is caused by the situation in the Middle East – this strategically vital region, owing to years of destructive policies pursued by Western actors, once again finds itself on the brink of destabilisation. Today, we believe it is still not too late to take urgent measures to de-escalate tensions in the area of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Furthermore, efforts must be intensified to create conditions for the resumption of negotiations on all matters pertaining to the final status, with the aim of rectifying the historical injustice that has thus far prevented the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in accordance with UN resolutions.
A complex situation persists regarding the Iranian nuclear programme. By dismantling the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (a decision taken eight years ago), certain circles in Israel, the United States, and Europe sought to terminate Tehran’s legitimate civilian nuclear developments, disregarding its rights under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Currently, we are observing negotiations between Washington and Tehran, wherein the principle of the right to enrichment for peaceful nuclear energy programmes remains pivotal. Judging by the parties’ comments following the latest round of talks, there is hope that progress will be achieved and that the process is moving in the right direction. We wish these efforts success in the hope that outcomes satisfactory to all interested parties, including Iran, will be reached.
In his address to this distinguished assembly, President of Russia Vladimir Putin emphasised the significance of this year as the 80th anniversary of the defeat of German Nazism and Japanese militarism, as well as the establishment of the modern world order – with the UN at its core – following the Second World War.
We advocate for the creation, under current conditions, of a global security architecture rooted in the objective trends of multipolarity, the emergence of new growth centres, and one that guarantees equal conditions for the peaceful development of all states without exception. Let me reiterate: the foundation for this already exists – the UN Charter. What is required is for all to adhere to it in good faith.
A crucial step towards the goal of global security is the formation of an architecture of equal and indivisible security on the Eurasian continent – the most expansive and resource-rich region, the stability of which underpins the resilience of a multipolar world. Yet, unlike Africa, which has the African Union, or Latin America, with CELAC, Eurasia lacks a comprehensive regional organisation.
In this context, President Vladimir Putin has proposed an initiative to establish a Eurasian security architecture, inviting all states and associations on the continent – including those in Western Eurasia – to participate in discussions on its formation. In our view, this must be a distinctly Eurasian architecture, as Euro-Atlantic concepts – applied to the European part of the continent over the decades following the Second World War and throughout the Cold War – have discredited themselves. NATO has violated every conceivable commitment it has undertaken. The OSCE has become dysfunctional due to Western countries and the OSCE Secretariat leadership abandoning their obligations under foundational documents, including the principles of consensus and impartiality. The European Union, having signed a subordinate agreement with NATO a few years ago, has effectively aligned itself with Euro-Atlantic schemes.
Russia proceeds from the understanding that our continent is already witnessing the formation of what President Vladimir Putin has termed the Greater Eurasian Partnership. This is evident in the alignment of integration processes within the EAEU, SCO, ASEAN, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and other subregional structures – including those in the Persian Gulf and the South Asian peninsula.
Numerous subregional organisations exist. Harmonising these integration processes will lay a solid material foundation for discussions on security architecture.
Russia does not seek to impose anything on anyone and is ready to engage in mutually respectful dialogue with everyone. We will keep perfecting the existing security mechanisms and put them to use as part of our engagement with the CSTO, CIS, and the SCO. We advocate novel principles in our bilateral ties with our partners and allies, and these principles will facilitate the emergence of a pan-continental architecture. In this context, allow me to mention the Treaty between Russia and Belarus on Security Guarantees within the Union State, as well as Russia’s comprehensive strategic partnership treaties with the DPRK and Iran.
I would like to place a special emphasis on the fact that from a conceptual standpoint, all the steps we make and the initiatives we take echo the Global Security Initiative as presented by President of the PRC Xi Jinping. This includes its instrumental provision which talks about identifying and addressing the root causes of any conflicts, no matter where they happen around the world, as a key to resolving them.
We believe that the next step would be to draft a Eurasian Charter for Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. Belarus put forward this draft document, and Russia supported it. It sets forth political and legal principles governing interstate relations across the Eurasian space while also describing the way they must cooperate in general in a multipolar world order by fully adhering to the UN Charter and considering the complementary nature of the principles it sets forth.
Colleagues,
Russia is firm in its commitment to bringing about solutions for overcoming challenges the world is facing today. In this context, our proactive efforts over the past years to promote cooperation in ensuring international information security play a primary role. Based on the principle of sovereign equality, we made the first step in this direction by spearheading the adoption of the Convention against Cyber Crime by the UN General Assembly in December 2024. This is the first universal instrument dealing with international information security, and we were the ones who initiated it. Russia calls on all countries to join this document. The signing process will begin in Vietnam’s capital next autumn.
It is our strong belief that the United Nations can keep stepping up its efforts to agree on the common universal criteria and principles in other domains, including the use of artificial intelligence, which has become a hot topic lately. We believe that the Group of Governmental Experts from the state parties of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons must take this topic on board. This Expert Group focuses on lethal autonomous systems.
I cannot fail to mention terrorism. It was mentioned in the video, and President Vladimir Putin also raised this issue in his message. We are interested in stepping up our cooperation with everyone who does not distinguish between what they call good and bad terrorists and rejects double standards.
I would like to draw your attention to the acts of terrorism perpetrated by the Kiev regime. Its intelligence agencies have been involved in organising the killings of Russian political figures, military commanders, journalists and civil society activists. This regime has made no secret of its plans to continue the massive shelling of civilian sites and civilians in the Russian Federation.
It is disappointing that the West has been responding only to legitimate and justified retaliatory measures we have taken in response to the Kiev regime’s terrorist attacks. Let me emphasise that it has been targeting civilian sites, while we focused our retaliatory strikes only on military facilities used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
We will do everything to ensure that everyone understands what is going on in order to expose the Kiev regime for its openly terrorist practices instead of trying to justify its actions.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia is aware of the responsibility it has for international relations in all their aspects on the international stage, including in terms of promoting peace, strategic stability, conflict settlement and a unifying agenda.
I wish all the participants fruitful discussions and every success in your responsible endeavours.”
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