Our guardians make sure we don’t hear much from the Russians except for the occasional phrase from Vladimir Putin that is promptly spun so for us that we don’t have to read it ourselves. It might be a healthy exercise to get out of the post-Rovian bubble and see what the Russians are thinking on the 78th anniversary of Victory Day, what we call V-E Day (and don’t celebrate).
RF Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave an important speech to his UN Security Council colleagues in late April, which got pretty much zero attention. It has some significant content.
Lavrov’s first statement was a reference to the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany by the “decisive contribution of my country with allied support” and the subsequent foundation of “the postwar international order” based on the UN Charter. Right out of the gate, Lavrov signals not only that the Red Army beat the Nazis but also ties that victory to the creation of the UN system. He is saying that the USSR and its descendant, the Russian Federation, laid the groundwork for a world consensus on how to maintain international peace. He insists that the UN’s guiding documents—especially “universally recognized standards of international law”—must form the basis of world security.
In contrast to the UN system that emerged from that war, Lavrov states, the US has devised a mysterious alternative called a “rules-based” order to replace international law. He complains that “Nobody has seen these rules. No one has discussed them.” Given that these “rules” have never been agreed to, it’s easy for the US and its allies to create them as they go along, which he says is exactly what they’re doing.
Lavrov criticizes what he says is a recurrent practice by the US of convening an international meeting on a given topic, selecting who can attend, and then declaring that the policies articulated there represent an “international community position.” This undermines the UN system by creating parallel procedures that inevitably produce outcomes favorable to one side, he says.
(Editorial insertion: The Russians are doing something similar through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the BRICS. One difference is that they don’t presume that these outfits represent some sort of “international community” aside from their member states.)
Returning to the WW2 theme later in his speech, Lavrov accuses the Kiev regime of “introducing the theory and practice of Nazism in everyday life,” including “huge torchlight processions under the banners of SS divisions” while “the West kept silent and rubbed its hands together.” In Russian eyes, we might conclude, World War II isn’t over.
Lavrov points out the irony of the sudden jettisoning of globalization by its erstwhile champions: globalization, he says, was “touted as a great benefit for humankind” for years. But now, through its punitive measures on trade and finance, the West is destroying globalization in favor of “sorting things out on the battlefield.”
Lavrov notes that NATO always insists it is a defensive alliance, but look at their expansion to Asia where they now have “responsibilities” in the Indo-Pacific region. He reiterates Russia’s well-known beef with the eastward expansion of NATO in Europe.
Lavrov made special hay out of the notorious comment by the EU’s top “diplomat” Joseph Borrell that Europe is a “garden” and the rest of the world a “jungle.” I’m sure that went down well in Africa. Count on the Russians to remind people of that offensive phrasing for a good while.
Lavrov is on tricky ground when addressing the issue of the sovereignty of nation states. He makes a case for Russia’s action in Ukraine by arguing that the UN treats sovereignty as less than absolute, meaning that it is based on “representing the whole people belonging to the territory.” Since the peoples of eastern Ukraine did not accept the coup government in Kiev after 2014, which sparked the civil war, he implies that Ukraine does not fulfill these requirements.
He then reminds listeners that the sovereignty principle is only important when the US says it is: there follow some whataboutisms re Kosovo (no referendum before secession); the bombing of Yugoslavia; Iraq 2003; Libya 2011. The Brits, says Lavrov, consider the Falkland Islands issue settled because the people who live there voted to remain British. And Crimea?
Lavrov recalls the attempts to settle the Ukrainian civil war (he doesn’t call it that) embodied in the two Minsk agreements, which Kiev and the West “cynically admitted with a tinge of pride that they never planned to fulfil.” That is undeniably accurate.
Lavrov denounced so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. He refuses to grant citizens of those nations agency for their own fates though he’s certainly not alone in that habit.
Lavrov makes interestingly gloomy statements about the future of the UN, whose foundational instruments he calls “a threat to Washington’s global ambitions.” He adds later that even the Secretary-General’s own staff are no longer behaving in the spirit of neutrality and instead are acting like agents of the West. He says the UN’s role in maintaining international peace is “crumbling before our eyes” and calls for the Security Council to be expanded to include Global South countries to replace the “overrepresented West.” Lavrov doesn’t elaborate on what should or might happen if that does not occur.
In short, Russia’s leadership sees today’s day of remembrance of their 27 million dead as a somber reminder of what the West is up to. Americans may see things differently, but I’m not sure how much that matters.
