Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the Business Council meeting, Moscow, March 12, 2025

Colleagues,

I am delighted to welcome you at a regular meeting of the Business Council under the Foreign Minister.

We regularly meet in this format, discussing current issues at the junction of foreign policy and the economy, including international and domestic economy, which are interconnected.

A regular and substantive exchange of views and coordinated efforts are especially important at this stage of historical development, where a hybrid and, to a degree, real war is being waged against Russia and attempts are being made to turn back the historical process of the development of a multipolar world.

Restrictions, sanctions and other methods of unfair competition are being used in the economy, with disruptions in the value chain, the growth of artificially created debts and the fragmentation of the legal and regulatory environment.

The governments of Western countries are taking advantage of their monopoly at international financial and other global governance institutions, undermining the principles which they promoted for decades, in particular, for the past 30 or 40 years, as universal and indispensable for the harmonious development of all countries without exception on the basis of a reasonable division of labour, the protection of property and the presumption of innocence. All this has been discarded when they set to work to play Ukraine against the Russian Federation in a bid to get a desired geopolitical effect.

Despite the negative trends that are impossible to gloss over, the consequences of that short-sighted and improvident Western policy cannot rule out the fact of the consistent and unfaltering shift of the global development centre from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asian-Pacific region, and on a broader scale, to the Global East and South which account for the better part of global economic growth. These statistics are clear evidence of the historical process and trend. We see the development of the new centres of attraction for trade and investment, as well as alternative business models, and the fading of the Western concepts that do not align with the new realities. Trust in these concepts, which looked inviolable only recently, has been undermined through the West’s actions.

The Russian economic operators, which have been working under pressure, have demonstrated readiness and ability to successfully work in international markets despite these challenges. Many of them are confidently working in the new fields of cooperation with international partners. A number of ambitious projects are being implemented in various spheres of bilateral and multilateral cooperation, as well as within the framework of integration formats.

The Foreign Ministry considers providing political and diplomatic support to domestic businesses in foreign markets one of its key priorities.

We believe it is fundamentally important to work together with the Government’s economic agencies and Russian companies to defend the sovereignty of the Russian Federation while steadily strengthening constructive engagement with a broad range of interested countries across the Global Majority.

We have no doubt that, sooner or later, a pragmatic approach to fostering fair and mutually beneficial cooperation with Russia will prevail – even in those countries whose governments currently pursue unfriendly, or to put it bluntly, openly hostile policies toward us. In fact, the first signs of such a shift can already be observed in some of them. However, we cannot afford to rely on the goodwill of our current adversaries, who have openly declared their goal of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia.  Our position is based on principle. First, experience has taught us not to trust Western promises but to judge solely by concrete actions. Second, recent years have reinforced a crucial lesson: we must never again allow key sectors of our economy, finance and technology to be dependent on the whims of Western suppliers. In the most critical areas – those ensuring our military, food and economic security – Russia must be self-sufficient. Naturally, this also involves working closely with our strategic partners and allies.

I am confident that leading Russian companies will play a substantial role in shaping a new paradigm of international economic relations and in establishing stable cooperation mechanisms with foreign partners – without unilateral concessions and without compromising our long-term national development goals or, in the broadest sense, our sovereignty.

Today, we have an excellent opportunity to discuss, in practical terms, possible forms of cooperation and concrete steps we can take in this direction.  It is essential for us to understand the real needs of Russia’s business community and to identify areas where joint efforts will create added value and bring tangible benefits to both the state and its citizens.