Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement and answers to media questions during a joint news conference with Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Republic of Mali Abdoulaye Diop, Bamako, February 7, 2023

Ladies and gentlemen,

We are satisfied with substantive and trust-based talks which began with a meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mali and will continue after the news conference, including during a reception with Mali’s Interim President Assimi Goïta.

This is the first ever visit by a Russian Foreign Minister to the Republic of Mali, which makes this a historic event. However, today, concrete actions are more important than symbols if we want to ensure justice in international affairs and respect for the key principles of the UN Charter. Mali and Russia think alike in this regard, including as part of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter that was created in New York not long ago.

Since the days of decolonisation, our shared position has been based on decades of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance. Our Malian friends remember well these glorious chapters in our history. We are interested in having a solid foundation that will allow us to build new, mutually beneficial and promising projects, which is what our respective presidents are directing us to pursue. They had several telephone conversations at the end of 2022. We outlined goals across all areas of trade, economic, investment, defence, humanitarian and foreign policy cooperation, which is a top priority for the two ministries.

According to the Minister, Mali’s Interim President Assimi Goïta has decided to participate in person in the second Russia-Africa summit to be held in St Petersburg in late July. We will be delighted to see the President and the Minister attend this important event.

We agreed to follow up on our efforts to expand cooperation in the trade, economic and investment spheres. Trade is growing fairly fast (up over 20 percent last year), but the absolute figures are less impressive. This is our shared assessment. We agreed that developing mineral resources, geological exploration, energy, transport and other infrastructure, as well as agriculture are promising areas for our efforts. We will orient our countries’ business circles towards intensifying their efforts to explore these opportunities. Among other things, we will focus specifically on preparations for the upcoming Economic Forum which precedes the Russia-Africa summit.

We continue to provide humanitarian assistance to Mali, primarily under bilateral arrangements. I hope that the shipment of wheat, fertilisers, petroleum products and other strategic goods will start soon. In addition to bilateral steps in this regard, we provide regular humanitarian aid in the form of food supplies via the UN World Food Programme.

Our cooperation in education goes back a long way. About 10,000 Malian citizens have received an education in our country, and this interaction continues. Starting with the 2023-2024 academic year, we will significantly increase the number of public grants available to Malian citizens from 35 to 290.

We appreciate our colleagues providing us with detailed information on the situation in Mali and the government’s efforts to stabilise the situation, as well as honest efforts to implement the 2015 Algiers Peace Agreement by all its signatories, and to prepare other steps to advance transition period goals. We share the opinion that security remains the main challenge for Mali at this point. Overcoming these challenges will create a solid basis for further action, including the planned elections.

We will do everything we can to support Mali in implementing these goals, including during discussions on these issues in the UN Security Council. The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) continues to operate in the country. The UN Security Council periodically reviews its mandate. This must be done with full consideration for the wishes expressed by the mission’s host country, Mali.

We will continue rendering the necessary assistance to our friends in our bilateral relations and not only in promoting its economic, trade and humanitarian development but also in enhancing the combat ability of the armed forces of Mali and training its military and law-enforcement officers. Our Malian friends have specific needs in this respect. We are trying to steadily meet these needs. In 2022-2023, our military and military-technical cooperation received a new dimension – Russia sent it a large consignment of aviation equipment. Due to this, the National Army of Mali recently conducted successful operations in countering terrorists that are still active on its territory. Russia supplied Mali with a second consignment of aviation equipment for these purposes on January 19 of this year.

The counterterrorism struggle is a current issue for other countries of this region as well. We will continue to assist in overcoming these difficulties. This applies to Guinea, Burkina-Faso, Chad and the entire Sahara-Sahel region, in addition to the coastal states of the Gulf of Guinea.

Talking to friends and drafting plans for the future in accordance with the agreements of our presidents, we emphasised that we are seeing a negative reaction from the Western states to these processes in Russian-Malian relations. We must state with regret that this is yet another manifestation of the West’s negative attitude to the principles of equality and mutual respect in international affairs and the provisions of the UN Charter on the sovereign equality of all states. It also demonstrates the neocolonialist approaches and double standards of the former mother countries.

The West is promoting its concept of a “rules-based order.” But nobody has ever described these rules. This has allowed our Western colleagues to manipulate public opinion in their countries and in states on other continents for several years now. In the past few years, the West’s obsession with its own exclusiveness, superiority and impunity has been manifest in its policy in almost every part of the world. In Europe, it is undermining the political agreements on which the architecture of European security was built. The West has refused to fix this on legally binding grounds. This has led to NATO’s reckless eastward expansion and turning Ukraine into a bridgehead for the start of a hybrid war against the Russian Federation.

NATO has declared that it will be in charge of security in Asia and the Pacific. NATO troops that have nothing to do with the Indian Ocean, have already launched regular military exercises there. It announced that their goal is to deter the People’s Republic of China. It is possible to find examples of how the US-led collective West is promoting its exclusiveness in any region of the world. To put it in simple terms, they want to decide the destinies of all nations in the world.

I made it clear earlier using the example of Mali that we are seeing relapsing into colonial thinking in Africa and attempts to build relations based on the old leader-follower principle. Just like our Malian friends and the vast majority of other African countries, we believe that former parent states should be leaving behind their memories of ever seizing and exploiting the countries of this continent. They need to come to grips with the fact that the world has changed. The 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was not imitation diplomacy (as the West is now referring to certain agreements), but a document that was unanimously approved by the UN General Assembly. As such, the Declaration is binding. The former parent states must respect the decisions taken on a universal basis and know their place in the current format of international relations.

We discussed our cooperation at the UN, where we act practically from overlapping positions. We are grateful to our Malian friends for supporting Russia’s initiatives on many items on the agenda of the world Organisation that are becoming increasingly important, such as the unacceptability of glorifying Nazism or starting an arms race in outer space; the importance of avoiding the deployment of weapons in outer space; developing confidence-building and transparency measures in outer space and many other initiatives promoted by Russia, including in the sphere of arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

We see our Malian friends’ principled approach to attempted provocations seeking to put forward, without any reason, anti-Russian resolutions. The Kiev regime and the Western curators who nurtured it are standing behind this. These provocations have nothing in common with the efforts to address practical issues. They are all about constantly injecting politics and ideology into everything to advance hysterical accusations against us in an effort to justify their own numerous military crimes, crimes against ethnic minorities and many other crimes committed by Kiev after the bloody coup of February 2014.

We will continue to help address issues in Africa. We believe that African issues should be addressed based on the “African solutions to African problems” principle, whereby the countries of the continent themselves agree on the path forward and no external player (especially former parent states) tries to impose any decision on them using unscrupulous personal or other types of pressure. We are in favour of giving the Africans the opportunity to agree on things among themselves. The international community should provide moral, political and legal support to their efforts through the UN Security Council as well as material support by way of improving their defence capabilities and chances for building regional cooperation associations that are open to the outside world and the countries that are willing to do business with African states on the basis of equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit.

This is how we are working with our Malian partners. I invite the Minister to remain in contact and to visit Russia at a convenient time. Anyway, we should be getting ready for the Russia-Africa summit. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Question (retranslated from French): I would like to ask you about the prospects of bilateral military and military-technical cooperation in the field of security. You mentioned Mali’s concern over this issue. Much has been done in this respect but we realise how much will have to be done to ensure our national security. We know that the Malians rely on Russia. Despite all efforts, the evil has not yet been fully eradicated. What do you plan to do to eradicate it completely in accordance with the goals the Government of Mali has set for itself? What else can be done cooperatively?

Sergey Lavrov: As for our military and military-technical cooperation, we discussed this issue in detail in our opening statements. In the past few months, we sent to Mali large consignments of aviation equipment that has substantially enhanced the capacity of the Malian Armed Forces and security structures to eradicate the terrorist threat. When it comes to aviation equipment, the Armed Forces, in particular the Air Force, of the Republic of Mali are among the most proficient and effective in the region. The same applies to the training of its military personnel. Equipment supplies and training go hand in hand. We will plan additional steps for education in military academies and for supplies of arms and combat equipment.

As for your specific question about our other plans, let’s not go into details at this point. This is not public information. It concerns agreements reached by the defence ministries by the decision of our presidents.

Question: Mali has turned down France’s defence services and is developing fundamentally new relations with Russia. Is it possible on the basis of this example to say that Paris has lost its status of a privileged partner of African nations and that the West’s policy of colonialism towards defenceless states is failing?

Sergey Lavrov: As part of your question, you stated that Mali has rejected France’s defence services. That is not my impression. When I talked with Mr Diop on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2021, the issue of Mali was one of the most urgent. I also met the then Foreign Minister of France Jean Yves Le Drian and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell. They told me they heard about Russia’s intention to develop military cooperation with Mali. They said this would not be the right thing to do. Only the European Union can do in Africa whatever it considers necessary.

My friend Mr Diop will correct me, if I am wrong on this, but at that time Mali’s position and its desire to find new partners in the area of security could be explained by France’s announcement that it would scale down its military projects in Mali, namely its three military bases and the French group of forces involved in Operation Barkhane. Following that, the EU’s contingent scaled back its presence.

When Mali’s former partners withdrew, affecting the security capabilities of the republic and its people, Bamako turned for help to the Russian Federation. Russia responded to the legitimate request of Mali’s legitimate government, as the Malian Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Mr Abdoulaye Diop, explained in his address at the UN General Assembly.

I have already commented on what Paris and other capitals are saying now about our cooperation with African countries. The die-hard neocolonial instincts are clearly preventing our Western colleagues from recognising modern realities and the need to become less obtrusive, to put it mildly, and accept the place that history has designated for them in the world and the fact that their activities are hindering the course of history.

I have  mentioned Mr Josep Borrell. I have just received information about his latest comment on our presence here. After our previous African tour several weeks ago, he followed in our footsteps and went to the South African Republic, where he did his utmost to undermine the opportunities for equal cooperation between Russia and African countries. At the least, his statements indicated that the Africans should not trust Russia. He said that Mr Lavrov was “touring Africa again” and that Mali was “an easy country” for Russia, “but others [are] not so easy.” He said that Russia was “trying to spread lies about who is guilty for what is happening there.” That statement was made by a person who cannot hide his racist vision of the world, who said a while ago that Europe was a “garden” (where he was obviously a gardener), surrounded by a “jungle” posing various threats to the “garden,” which must therefore be more careful with the “jungle” to protect its prosperity from the jungle’s negative influences.

What more can I say about their attitude to the African countries’ requirements and interests? We have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. We were involved in Africa’s liberation from colonialism from the very beginning. The Soviet Union was among the main initiators of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It was not a “decoy,” as Boris Johnson has recently described the Minsk agreements for Ukraine. The declaration on decolonisation was an effective historical document that formalised the end of the era of colonial dominance. However, France has not yet fulfilled the UNGA resolutions under which it must surrender the island of Mayotte to the Union of the Comoros, and London is still illegally controlling the Chagos Archipelago, contrary to the UNGA demands. But the decolonisation process is 99 percent complete. I hope the General Assembly will carry through the remaining issues. The recent and current outbreaks of colonial instincts are deplorable examples of our Western colleagues’ persisting illusions and their refusal to admit that history demands the implementation of the UN Charter’s provision on the need to respect the sovereign equality of states.

Question (retranslated from French): Mali is cooperating with China and other Western countries. What is Mali’s place in cooperation with Russia?

Sergey Lavrov: Regarding trade and economic cooperation between our countries and figures for Mali’s trade with China and Western countries, we believe that this  is for our Malian friends to decide. It is true that Russa-Mali trade is modest so far, but the outlook is good both for trade and for joint investment projects.

Our share in Mali’s foreign trade will increase. We have no and cannot have any problem with the Malian authorities’ decisions regarding their economic partners, be it China or any other countries. The Malians themselves and their authorities, the ministers responsible for their spheres of operation will take decisions with due regard for all the available factors and, most importantly, with a view to ensuring the country’s long-term interests.

Question: UN experts have called for investigating “possible crimes” committed by the Malian army and PMC Wagner. Could you comment on that initiative?

Sergey Lavrov:  I am not aware that there are UN “experts” authorised to investigate war crimes committed by anyone.

I know that the UN Security Council has the power to do that, and that similar powers are stipulated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The states parties to that statute are obliged to comply with the court’s decisions. But we have seen a few departures from the rules made in the context of the neo-colonial logic of “exceptionalism.” Many years ago, the ICC decided to investigate facts, which were quite convincing, about the crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan. The court consolidated testimony, video and photo materials. And thenWashington simply told the ICC prosecutor, judges and staff that if they decided to investigate Washington’s possible war crimes in Afghanistan, all of them would be put on the sanctions list, which would be contrary to their interests, because many of them have accounts in US banks and children studying at US universities.

I cannot say what influenced the ICC’s decision, but it has largely discredited itself, if only because of the above case. No expert at the UN can say that they are investigating any crime or conducting any other investigation. There are established procedures, which our Western colleagues have been trying to disrupt. They are trying to undermine the authority of the UN Security Council, manipulate the UN General Assembly (which is a gross and direct violation of the assembly’s powers set out in the UN Charter) and the UN Secretariat in their campaign to “privatise” important UN bodies and use them in their own interests. We are aware of this. We have notified the leadership of the Secretariat that it is unacceptable to look silently on these attempts. We will continue to do this in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the UN member states, so as to cut short the neocolonial efforts to turn it into a convenient tool for promoting unilateral interests.