LONDON: Russia’s Foreign Minister said in a speech at the UN General Assembly on Saturday that Russian troops will “certainly” help in rebuilding trust between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Sergei Lavrov said it was time the dispute between the two countries was settled, adding that Western countries were trying to imposes themselves as mediators, but were not needed.
“Yerevan and Baku actually did settle the situation,” he said. “Time has come for mutual trust-building. There are Russian troops who will certainly help this.”
Russia has peacekeeping missions in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Azerbaijan launched an offensive this week and where the ethnic Armenian leadership said the terms of their ceasefire with Azerbaijan were being implemented.
Lavrov also said Ukraine’s proposed peace plan in its war with Russia, as well as UN suggestions for reviving the Black Sea Grain Initiative, were “not realistic,” but did not elaborate further on the 19-month conflict.
“It is completely not feasible,” he said of the 10-point peace blueprint promoted by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky. “It is not possible to implement this. It’s not realistic and everybody understands this. But at the same time, they say this is the only basis for negotiations.”
Lavrov criticized the West throughout his speech, and accused it of “fueling conflicts,” “dividing humanity” and “preventing the formation of a genuine multipolar world.”
He called for the expansion of the UN Security Council, which he said was skewed toward preserving Western hegemony.
“(The rest of the planet) don’t want to live under anybody’s yoke anymore,” he said, adding that this was evident by the growth of groups such as BRICS, which recently invited Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to join.
“Our future is being shaped by a struggle, a struggle between the global majority in favor of a fairer distribution of global benefits and civilized diversity, and between the few who wield neo-colonial methods of subjugation in order to maintain their domination which is slipping through their hands,” he said.
“The US and its subordinate Western collective are continuing to fuel conflicts which artificially divide humanity into hostile blocks and hamper the achievement of overall aims. They’re doing everything they can to prevent the formation of a genuine multipolar world order.
“They are trying to force the world to play according to their own self-centered rules,” he said.
