Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, stated here Thursday that the West is pitting China and India against one another.
“Culture without Borders: the Role and Development of Cultural Diplomacy” is a diplomatic club conference where Lavrov gave the remarks, the state-run TASS news agency said.
“Pay attention to the current events in the Asia-Pacific region. The West has begun to call on the Indo-Pacific region to give its policies a clear anti-China orientation — expecting to further clash with our great friends and neighbors China and India,” Lavrov stated.
After the formation of AUKUS, a military alliance of Australia, the UK, and the US, Lavrov, who was a strong opponent of the QUAD alliance—which included Japan, Australia, India, and the US—to contain China, has toned down his opposition.
According to the foreign minister, the West is attempting to diminish ASEAN’s significance in Asia.
As in other parts of the world, Lavrov was quoted by TASS as saying, “Western colleagues want to play a major role here, they want to undermine the central role of ASEAN, which suited everyone for many, many decades and was based on the formation of a unifying space by the ASEAN countries and their partners in dialogue both in the field of politics and in the field of military cooperation, in the field of defense.”
Ten Southeast Asian nations make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional organization whose goal is to foster security and economic cooperation among its members. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are the ten member nations.
According to Lavrov, “our Western colleagues are gradually eroding the principles of consensus and the pursuit of common ground, and they are attempting to entice some ASEAN members into openly confrontational rather than unifying formats: various troikas, quartets.”
He also advocated for an agreement on Eurasia’s collective security.
“Eurarasia is the only continent without a continent-wide structure, and it is also the only continent where so many civilizations have coexisted and managed to preserve their identity and relevance in the modern era.” Such a unifying process is necessary in Eurasia in order to balance the interests of numerous major, genuinely significant states and civilizations, Lavrov stated.
The African Union is one of the sub-regional frameworks in Africa, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) is in Latin America and the Caribbean, and there is currently nothing comparable in Eurasia, he reminded them.
