Johannesburg - Veteran Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov gave the international community the clearest hint about Russia’s concerns and fears amid the deteriorating geopolitical wrangling, thereby pointing at possible solutions.
Addressing the 77th Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) 2022 in New York last week, Lavrov engaged the heads of state who were meeting face-to-face for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. In a charged speech, Lavrov sparred none of his country’s detractors in the US-led Nato and the EU, who have unleashed a sustained barrage of unprecedented punitive sanctions against Moscow.
He said: “They are not shying away from declaring the intent to inflict not only the military defeat on our country but also to destroy and fracture Russia.”
Lavrov added: “The official Russophobia in the West is unprecedented. Now the scope is grotesque.”
If truth be told, Russia has over the years publicly raised its concerns about threats to its national security and interests created by Nato’s expansion eastwards.
Russia reminded the US in particular about an undertaking Nato made at the turn of the 1990s when the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended. In a communique with the Soviet Union’s last premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nato promised never to expand eastwards.
As we speak Finland, which has the EU’s longest border with Russia at over 1 300km and Sweden, are the latest to join Nato, an organisation described as “defensive”, and not “offensive”.
However, when Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded his US counterpart, Joe Biden and the leadership of Nato about the promise, they mocked and ridiculed him.
Amid this unfortunate geopolitical miscalculation, Nato was rapidly pocketing the national interest of Russia’s next-door neighbour, Ukraine, encouraging the government of Volodymyr Zelensky to apply to join Nato.
The destabilising effects and impact of the US and Nato on Russia’s doorstep reached a fever pitch back in 2014 when they sponsored a coup against the democratically-elected pro-Russian President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Thirteen police officers were killed in the coup and 108 protesters lost their lives.
Immediately afterwards Crimea, the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian region, expressed its opposition to the Western-backed coup by holding a referendum to secede. After an overwhelming “yes” vote, Crimea willingly got reincorporated into Russia despite murmurings of Western disapproval and accusation of “annexation of Crimea” by Russia.
A similar script played itself out over the past fortnight. Four regions of Ukraine emulated Crimea. The four are Donetsk and Luhansk, which had already declared themselves independent in earlier polls. The other two are Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, home to Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant that Russia has occupied since the war started.
The referenda takes place in an atmosphere of unprecedented Kyiv-led anti-Russian sentiment, characterised by the Zelensky administration’s ban on the Russian language, music, culture, customs and traditions. This ban is although historically, and practically, the Russian language is one of the main spoken languages in Ukraine.
By the end of this week, reports emanating from Russia were indicating that an overwhelming majority of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the four regions have voted to be reincorporated in Russia.
Predictably, as was the case in Crimea in 2014, President Putin and the Kremlin are all too happy to embrace the gesture.
This time, however, the volume of protestation from Nato and the West is much higher, buoyed in part by the unprecedented barrage of punitive sanctions imposed against Moscow since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict on February 24.
As the European winter fast approaches, the Russian oil and gas prices have sent various European economies on a tailspin. Inflation is shooting up drastically, causing social protests and unrest in places such as Germany, France, Spain and Czech Republic, among others.
The rise of nationalist right-wing parties is also gradually replacing traditional pro-EU parties. The latest case in point is Italy’s sudden change in the political landscape. One Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, won the recent elections. She is known to share little enthusiasm and appetite for the anti-Russian onslaught as her predecessor. Meloni is set to become Italy’s first woman prime minister.
Right at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, President Zelensky often challenged the Kremlin to peace talks. A few rounds of such did take place – initially in neighbouring Poland and later in Turkey. But instead of the process being supported by the West, the US-led Nato elected to ramp up its supply of lethal weapons, bottomless pit of money and personnel to Kyiv to fight on.
Their anti-Russian rhetoric, carried out in their well-funded, powerful mainstream media supported by influential social media platforms, remains the loudest. Pro-Russian media outlets, such as RT (Russia Today), were duly outlawed right at the outbreak of the war.
The West says they want Russia to abide by the “rules-based world order”. However, they mean their rules, created by themselves alone.
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently lamented the departure by powerful nations in particular away from the ethos of international co-operation, or multilateralism, as Guterres called it.
The emergence of sectarian power blocs whose modus operandi is to pursue their national interest at all cost have bred an unwanted spirit of unilateralism in geopolitics.
The world has become unipolar. The mighty rule the poor and the weak. This makes the UN look too slow to act and weak, Guterres said.
And this, in part, explains why Russia’s concerns and fears have fallen on deaf Western ears repeatedly, leaving Moscow frustrated and exasperated, perhaps even desperate.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has often dared Moscow to carry out its threats. Now, despite the unprecedented sanctions the whole world is adversely affected by the repercussions of what some scholars argue has become “America’s proxy war”.
The US is benefiting immensely from the conflict it is directing, and funding. In a clever move by the Biden administration, the EU has agreed to buy gas directly from the US despite the astronomical prices compared to the nearby inexpensive Russian gas. Reason? Ideological, nothing to do with economics.
Before winter is out, methinks many regimes across Europe would have collapsed. The Russian sanctions are proving not to be a one-way stream. They are biting the hand that unleashed them, too. This was not part of the script. Only the sophisticated public relations machinery of the West is delaying the rest of the world to see the truth for what it is.
At the UNGA 2022, Lavrov openly charged: “The United States,” he said, “was trying to turn the entire world into its backyard.”
Lavrov continued: “Declaring themselves victorious in the Cold War, Washington erected themselves almost into an envoy of God on Earth.” Lavrov said since the end of the Cold War at the turn of the 90s, precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has been operating with impunity “as the self-proclaimed masters of the world”.
As things stand, the world can only expect the worst before the situation gets any better. The US is receiving none of its service men and women back home in body bags, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like many wars fought selectively, Washington is investing material support from afar in its rarefied atmosphere back home.
In the interest of global peace and stability, Nato is morally and duty-bound to lend support to efforts by the UN’s chief Guterres in his feeble attempts and efforts to broker peace in Ukraine. But then, Guterres cannot win. It’s not up to him. The protagonists of the conflict – the masterminds behind Kyiv - the US-led Nato, hold all the keys to any peace treaty.
For now, they hope and pray that as the war prolongs, Russian citizens would grow weary and rise against the Kremlin, and collapse the Putin government.
Their interest is far from a peace deal. As Lavrov opined, all they want is to destroy Russia and recreate the country into smaller autonomous regions of weaker international significance. That’s the end game.