Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the meeting with delegation of the Permanent Committee of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, Perm, May 29, 2025

Dear colleagues,

Dear friends,  

This is the year when the International Conference of Asian Political Parties commemorates its 25th anniversary. And because of their reputation and their authority, they are a platform for exchanging views and experience in the context of party-to-party cooperation. Cooperation at this level is one of our priorities.

It's a very useful addition to the so-called classical diplomacy and that contributes a lot to promoting mutual trust, mutual understanding between peoples.

We consider your conference and the creation of the conference is a signal, a very clear signal to the entire world. And very timely response to reconsider the place of the Asian countries in international and global developments. We assess very positively the increase of the political work of your conference. And we see with pleasure the sustainable process of expanding your influence in the continental architecture, in the architecture of regional organizations, some of which are experiencing erosion of their influence, if not degradation, since they abandoned practically all of the key principles of the United Nations Charter.

I have in mind such organizations on our Eurasian continent as the European Union, which became more Euro-Atlantic than Eurasian following NATO. And of course, OSCE was originally initiated by European countries and the Soviet Union. More than 50 years ago, when the Helsinki Conference was negotiated, they insisted that North America be brought in, U.S. and Canada. And over the years, well, there was some period when very solemn and right statements and documents were adopted and signed, but then in the last 10-15 years, all these principles including equal and indivisible security, including the statement that no one, be it the country or organization, should prepare to dominate in Europe, all this was abandoned, violated. That's why I will speak today at the Eurasian Conference, I will emphasize our assessment regarding the falure of Euro-Atlantic concepts.

We need Eurasia of course. And by the way, Eurasia is the biggest, the richest continent. The continent which, unlike Africa and Latin America, is home of several world civilizations with thousands and thousands of years of history. There are some civilizations, of course, Maya and others in Latin America, but they are no longer in existence. In Asia – Chinese, Indian. Pakistan, of course. Also Türkiye is really trying to keep its traditions and to develop them to bring the new generation up to those traditions.

But with all these facts, Eurasia is the only continent which doesn't have any universal continental structure, like African Union in Africa, like CELAC in Latin America. We have quite a lot, many integrational movements, organizations which address security issues, like Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN, Collective Security Treaty Organization, Commonwealth of Independent States and the Gulf Cooperation Council, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation  and there is no umbrella.

Our friends from Kazakhstan have been for many years promoting the СICA, Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia. Now they want to transform it into an organization. We advise them that this organization should be very well prepared: the charter, the principles, the rights and obligations. Our strong belief that it should be not just Asia, but Eurasia, inviting the western part of the continent to come. And one example, as I will speak about this a bit later, the Belorussians, who already for two consecutive years are convening Conference on Eurasian Security. I attended both, it is now an annual event, the third one will be held in October, and they invite European representatives, foreign ministers of Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia participated in the last conference, and it is important that we, while keeping the identity of all existing organizations, including your organization, we try to have some place where all countries and organizations of the continent can come, not necessarily to have it in the format of an organization, but a meeting, a meeting of all of them. So we are thinking in this direction, and I will elaborate on this a bit later today. Otherwise, I think that you are doing a very good job. We also know that you are in favor of making more conferences with your partners in other parts of the world. And the Permanent Conference in Latin America, and the Council of African Political Parties, as I said, we are very much in favor of promoting party-to-party dialogue. Our ruling party, United Russia, in cooperation with other parliamentary parties and their fractions is promoting very actively this kind of cooperation. And I will highlight the initiative of United Russia of last year, when they convened a meeting of various parties to consider methods of fighting the new forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and now there is a movement created on the basis of the conference, which is called «Freedom of Nations». And we strongly support this. And actually, this theme, you know, the inadmissibility of neo-colonial forms of exploitation is one of the agenda items of the Group of Friends of the United Nations Charter in the United Nations. Last year, we initiated, through this group, the resolution of the UN Committee on Decolonization. The draft resolution supported by this committee was accepted by the United Nations General Assembly. There was some vote, of course, but a clear majority supported it, and the idea is to announce the 14th of December, the day of the adoption of The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960, as a date of fighting the new forms of neo-colonialism. It's an interesting thing, and I believe your parties also can look at this, because colonial exploitation was very blunt. Slaves, you know, digging the resources and leaving the countries in very poor condition. But now, if you take the economic system in the world, countries, especially in Africa, mostly produce, they provide natural resources to the western countries, and I always quote the statement of President of Uganda, Mr. Museveni, who couple of years ago, at the second Russia-Africa summit was giving an example, an illustration of what we're doing. Well, he said that the world coffee market is valued at some 460 billion dollars, out of which only 2,5 billion dollars remain in Africa. They just grow beans, and the raw beans are being sent to Germany and other countries when they are fried, you know, and then packed, and so on and so forth. So this is what in brief the colonial forms are about, and we would like to promote the movement to resolve this injustice. Without fighting any country, we never want to isolate any country from cooperation, but cooperation must be based on equal footing, just principles, and we once again express our readiness to cooperate with your conference.