Interfax: “Lavrov: Putin will speak at UN of Western abuses of sanctions’ mechanism”
MOSCOW. Sept 13 (Interfax) – The obsession of the West with sanctions and not only with regard to Russia will become one of the subjects of the speech of President Vladimir Putin at the jubilee session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced.
“We assume that Putin will express our principled evaluations of the most pressing problems of the world today,” Lavrov said in an interview with Voskresnoye Vremya (Sunday Time) current events’ show.
Among such problems Lavrov named “the problem of unilateral compulsion measures, of course, and not only with regard to Russia.”
“Now our Western partners, primarily under the influence of American psychology are losing the culture of dialogue and diplomatic solutions. The Iranian nuclear program was a striking and very rare exception,” Lavrov believes.
“In most other cases in conflicts that continue flaring up in the Middle East and North Africa they attempt to resort to direct armed interference the way it was in Iraq and Libya in violation of UN Security Council resolutions or to sanctions,” he pointed out.
Lavrov named the examples of Yemen and South Sudan “where the process of domestic settlements was stimulated from abroad and largely imposed on them.”
“Such a pattern, if it had been solidly based on the understandings of the sides instead of outside advice and recipes, would have become more lasting. And as soon as such a pattern starts faltering which is inevitable when hasty solutions are imposed, they immediately take out their ‘sanction big stick’ and suggest punishing those who don’t want to cooperate according to this pattern,” Lavrov said.
“This is a long story, a certain recurrence and obsession with sanction measures. As soon as something does not fit the molds of our Western partners they immediately resort to sanctions as an instrument,” he felt.
“President Putin will speak on this subject,” he said.
According to Lavrov, the Russian president will also speak of “the problem of fragmentation of the world economic space because in the framework of WTO talks are faltering on guaranteeing a generalized approach to new spheres of economic and technological ties between states.”
“He will also speak of concrete aspects such as Syria and the Ukrainian crisis,” the minister said stressing that “all these crises stem from systemic problems related to attempts to freeze the process of forming a polycentric world.”
Lavrov added that the pressing problems that Putin is going to evaluate will include widely-debated themes such as resistance to terrorism. This resistance “should be free of dual standards, from dividing terrorists into good and bad, from supposing that it is possible to interact with some of these bad extremist-minded people for achieving some specific temporary geopolitical objectives,” he said.
Lavrov said that the Russian president will be visiting the UN General Assembly because it will be a jubilee, not a routine one and because the overwhelming majority of world leaders will attend it.
The president of Russia will be speaking at the UN General Assembly for the first time in ten years.
[featured image is file photo]