📄 President Vladimir Putin congratulated current staff and veterans of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Diplomatic Worker’s Day.

💬 Vladimir Putin: The Russian Foreign Ministry rightfully takes pride in its rich history and glorious traditions. Throughout history, its employees have honourably protected the interests of the Motherland in the international arena despite any difficulties and challenges.

In the current geopolitical landscape, amidst a hybrid war unleashed against us and attempts by the collective West to isolate Russia and undermine its security, the Foreign Ministry faces difficult and responsible tasks.

Russian diplomacy aims to make a significant contribution to creating favourable external conditions for our country’s dynamic development, fostering effective cooperation with foreign partners, and promoting a positive agenda in international relations. It also seeks to strengthen the unity of the global majority – of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America – in order to build a just multipolar world order based on true equality, mutual respect, and universally recognised norms of international law.

❗️ Efforts to enhance cooperation with #CIS countries, expand the integration process within the #EAEU, and strengthen ties within the #CSTO and the Union State remain a top priority. Special attention should be given to the proper implementation of tasks and responsibilities during Russia’s chairmanship of the CIS and of the expanded #BRICS association.

Undoubtedly, there is significant need for efforts aimed at uniting the multinational and multi-religious Russian community through supporting our compatriots abroad, promoting the Russian language and showcasing national cultural and scientific achievements, as well as countering attempts to falsify history and revise the outcomes of World War II.

I am confident that staff members at the Ministry’s head office and foreign missions will continue to work with utmost dedication, creativity, and initiative.

#DiplomatsDay

🎙 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at an extended meeting with the participation of the Foreign Ministers from the Global South and the Global East (June 11, 2024, Nizhny Novgorod)

💬 Welcome to Russia and Nizhny Novgorod, a beautiful city, the beauty of which and the feelings of the residents of which you had the chance to enjoy yesterday.

Today’s meeting reflects the efforts of #BRICS members to develop ties with the stakeholder countries from the Global South and the Global East, the countries of the Global Majority,

in order to identify solutions to the most pressing global issues faced by all members of the international community without exception.

We are witnessing a profound transformation of international relations triggered by the formation of a fairer and polycentric system of international order, which would reflect the entire gamut of cultural and civilisational diversity of the modern-day world and ensure the right of every nation to determine its own future and its own path of development.

The stronger voice of the Global Majority, i.e. the countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, which are not part of the collective West, is a major trend now.

Only by uniting our ranks can we truly effectively promote a vision of a just future shared by all of us. In this context, it is important to strengthen the role of the country-to-country groups that advocate balanced and equitable approaches to international development.

We are talking about the formats which reflect the principles of equitable cooperation in practice rather than in words. These include, along with BRICS, #SCO, #AfricanUnion, #EAEU, #CIS, #ASEAN, #LAS, #CELAC, #GCC, #IORA and many other organisations. The chairs of many of these organisations are here with us.

We believe it is important to establish contacts between all such integration entities which operate at regional levels, on the one hand, and our global association BRICS, on the other hand. This will promote gradual and mutually respectful harmonisation of approaches to the issues facing all associations.

The strengthening the international legal framework and collective decision-making on global issues is now at the forefront. Only in this case will those decisions be effective and legitimate.

This principle is laid down in the UN Charter. Unfortunately, the collective West’s decisions, especially in the economy, finance, trade and more, increasingly fail to comply with the fundamental principles of the UN Charter.

Our countries have largely overlapping approaches to reforming the system of multilateral institutions, including the UN and the UN Security Council, as well as addressing the post-pandemic recovery of the global economy and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals approved by the UN General Assembly.

🤝 We look forward to discussing all these issues today.

✍️ Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s greetings to organisers of and participants of the 5th Kazan International Congress of Eurasian Integration

💬 I would like to warmly greet the organisers of and participants of the 5th Kazan International Congress of Eurasian Integration.

Your platform brings together a wide range of state officials and civil society activists, experts on international affairs, economists and representatives of academic circles; all of them are interested in strengthening multifaceted cooperation across the Eurasian region we share.

In today’s challenging global environment, created by the destructive policies of the collective West, your work to forge a constructive international agenda seems to be in high demand.

Several promising integration formats, including the #UnionState, the #EAEU, the #SCO, as well as the #CIS, chaired by Russia in 2024, function in Eurasia. The initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin on establishing a Greater Eurasian Partnership aims to synchronise collaboration between them.

☝️ You will review a wide range of issues regarding expanded practical cooperation in Eurasia. Certainly, we welcome your interest in such a new multilateral entity as #BRICS, also chaired by Russia this year.

I am confident that the congress will contribute to strengthening friendship and trust between nations, and that it will help draft useful recommendations.

🤝 I wish you successful work and all the best.

🎙 Briefing by Foreign Ministry Information and Press Department’s Deputy Director Andrey Nastasin (July 31, 2024)

🔹 Assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh
🔹 Israel’s strike against Beirut
🔹 Ukrainian crisis
🔹 Kiev’s decision to cut off the Druzhba oil pipeline
🔹 Situation in Moldova
🔹 Japan and the US renew an agreement on the parameters of lethal arms exports
🔹 Statements by IOC President Thomas Bach
🔹 Interim results of Russia’s #CIS Chairmanship in the first six months of 2024
🔹 80 years of liberating Kaunas from Nazi invaders
🔹 The 80th Anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Lebanon
🔹 Prospects of #RussiaALBA cooperation

📰 Read
📺 Watch

#KievRegimeCrimes

❗️Kiev continues to detain church hierarchs under far-fetched pretexts, holding them under arrest for months without recourse to court, and openly declaring its desire to use the clergy in POW swaps.

Illegal takeovers of Ukrainian Orthodox Church churches by representatives of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian police continue.

▪️ July 11 – the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Kiev Region was taken away from the believers;
▪️ July 18 – St Nicholas Church in the Khmelnytsky Region was taken away;
▪️ June 28 – a court in Ternopol denied the UOC the right to use the local cathedral;
▪️ July 5 – a Kiev court seized the Yeletsky Monastery from the UOC.

No matter how hard Zelensky’s regime tries to fulfill the its American masters’ order to destroy canonical Orthodoxy, he will not succeed. True faith will forever remain in the hearts of millions of Ukrainians.

#Moldova

⚠️ We have repeatedly pointed out that the Moldovan authorities are leading the country along the same path as that taken by Ukraine and the Baltic states. This trend continues. On July 25, Prime Minister Dorin Recean welcomed the launch of a Moldovan website identical to the Ukrainian Myrotvorets facility. According to him, initiatives like this one are what will help build Moldova’s “European future.”

Such unrealistic statements and incompetent actions by the country’s leadership are causing growing protests not only in Moldova itself, but also in Moldovan diasporas abroad, including in Western Europe. <...>

👉 All of this is a logical outcome of the policy aimed at dismantling the country’s statehood and national identity and at renouncing the traditional values.

It is for a reason that the Moldovans display warm feelings towards Russia, which has always treated Moldova as an equal partner, and openly laugh at the “Russian threat” allegations. We remain friends. All attempts to destroy this are doomed.

🇺🇳 The Russian Federation completed its Presidency in the United Nations Security Council on July 31. Its packed agenda revolved around three central events, with the first two of them attended by FM Sergey Lavrov.

On July 16, we held a high-level open debate titled “Multilateral cooperation in the interest of a more just, democratic and sustainable world order,” which reaffirmed the need to hold detailed discussions dealing with the underpinnings of the emerging multipolar world order, the objective to reinforce a UN-centred system of international relations, as well as the need to carry out a comprehensive review of the root causes of present-day conflicts and to consolidate our efforts in order to overcome them. The fact that the Global Majority tends to distrust the infamous Western concept of a rules-based world order was also mentioned during the debate.

On July 17, the Security Council held a quarterly ministerial-level debate on the agenda item titled “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.” During this meeting, participants discussed the situation in the region with all its tension, while placing a special emphasis on the escalating violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict zone for finding ways out of this unprecedented crisis. In addition to this, the UNSC held separate meetings on July 26 and 31 on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the assassination of the Hamas Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

On July 19, the UNSC held a debate titled “Cooperation between the United Nations and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (#CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (#CIS), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (#SCO).” In his remarks, Deputy FM Sergey Vershinin stressed the importance for the UN to work closer with constructive regional organisations. <...>

In addition to this, Russia’s UNSC Presidency included all the events as part of the mandate-reporting cycle.

👉 The Middle East bloc included meetings on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
👉 The African agenda covered discussions of the situation in West Africa, the Sahara and Sahel region, and the DR Congo.
👉 The council also touched upon peacebuilding efforts in Columbia and the start of deploying the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti.
👉 We exchanged views on the activities of the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia and the Cyprus settlement.

❗️The Ukraine crisis remained high on the agenda. On July 9, Western countries convened a Security Council meeting in connection with the tragic incident involving a children’s hospital in Kiev. During the debate, the Russian delegation refuted accusations by its opponents and shared evidence demonstrating that the Ukrainian air defence systems were to blame for the incident. On July 25, Russia initiated a UNSC meeting to discuss the unrelenting flow of Western weapons into Ukraine, which delays a settlement in this conflict and leads to more victims.

The Security Council adopted four resolutions in July:

✅ on focusing the CAR arms embargo on illegal armed groups;
✅ extending the mandates for the UN Mission to support the Hodeidah Agreement and the UN Integrated Office in Haiti;
✅ regarding the UN Focal Point on delisting-related matters and re-establishing the Informal Working Group of the Security Council on General UNSC Sanctions Issues.

🇺🇳 Russia went to great lengths to enable the Security Council to be effective and responsive in its work. We encouraged our colleagues within the Council to come up with collective responses when dealing with challenges to peace and security, while seeking guidance from a holistic view of the purposes and principles set forth in the UN Charter and their inter-connected nature. The central events on the agenda of the Russian Presidency attracted a lot of attention within the international community, reaffirming our country’s high authority and the respect it commands as a UN founding member and permanent member of the Security Council.

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#RussiaUN

🗓 On October 7, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov chaired a regular meeting of the #CIS Council of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow.

The Ministers summed up the results of the Commonwealth foreign ministries’ joint work in view of implementing the priorities of the Russian chairmanship in 2024. A wide range of issues related to CIS format interaction were discussed.

Sergey Lavrov informed Russia’s partners about its approaches to the topical international and regional topics, including the developments in the Middle East and the crisis around Ukraine.

📃 Statements by the CIS Foreign Ministers on the principles of cooperation in ensuring security in Eurasia, the unacceptability of using unilateral restrictive measures in international relations, and on cooperation in the field of fitness and sports were adopted. The 2025 schedule of multi-level consultations between the CIS foreign ministries within the Commonwealth was approved. The status of CIS basic institutions has been assigned to a number of Russian and Belarusian institutes and universities specialising in training personnel in mass communications, legal advocacy and volunteer movements, as well as in the field of countering terrorism and extremism.

Most of the documents considered by the ministers will be submitted for approval to the Council of CIS Heads of State on October 8, 2024. These include draft addresses of the CIS Heads of State to the Commonwealth nations and the world community on the 80th anniversary of the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, a 2025-2027 cooperation programme in de-radicalisation, and a decision on determining the cultural capitals of the Commonwealth for the coming three years, among others.

ℹ️ The next meeting of the Council of CIS Foreign Ministers will be held on April 11, 2025 in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

🎙 Remarks by President of Russia Vladimir Putin at the expanded meeting of the CIS Heads of State (October 8, 2024)

💬 President Vladimir Putin: The Commonwealth of Independent States is developing. All the Leaders gathered here support further deepening of the Commonwealth. We can see that our joint efforts are consistently promoting the #CIS’s authority as a regional integration association.

The Commonwealth members act solely on the principles of mutual understanding, equality and neighbourliness, and successfully solve key tasks to improve our citizens’ well-being and quality of life.

It is largely through this that we have managed to preserve, and in some areas expand, the economic, social, cultural and humanitarian ties that have been developed over many years of living as part of a single state.

📈 As it has been noted numerous times today, the entire span of the CIS shows positive dynamic in macroeconomic and, indeed, economic terms. The GDP of CIS members is growing at a good pace, as trade and investment ties between them are becoming stronger.

For instance, trade between Russia and other CIS states in just seven months of this year grew by an impressive 7.7%, totaling $63.2 billion, in spite of the volatility displayed by the global markets.

Companies from CIS countries carry out mutually beneficial projects in energy, industry, and infrastructure, jointly implement import substitution programmes, as a new, national currency-based financial system impervious to external factors is being established.

Obviously, cooperation between the CIS countries is not limited to the economy. Cooperation on the cultural track, which is based on the sinvere mutual interest of our countries’ peoples in each other’s culture and traditions, is making good headway.

Next year will mark the 80th Anniversary of the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War. In this regard, a joint Appeal to the Commonwealth nations and the world community will be adopted following the results of our meeting. <...>

☝️ In the current difficult global situation, it is crucial that all CIS states advocate the formation of a fair world order based on universally recognised principles of international law with the pivotal role of the UN. We constantly coordinate positions on key global and regional issues, and our approaches are traditionally close or completely coincide.

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#Announcement

🗓 The 31st OSCE Ministerial Council meeting (Ministerial Council) will be held in Valletta, Republic of Malta, on December 5-6, with the participation of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. <...>

During the forthcoming Ministerial Council meeting, the Russian delegation will focus on assessing the possibility of overcoming the organisation’s crisis on the eve of its 50th anniversary.

The Russian delegation looks forward to having a candid discussion of the backlog of issues and ways to resolve them under fundamentally new conditions, while respecting the interests of all participating states free from the teacher-disciple approach, and so on.

☝️ Special attention will be brought to the failure to issue visas to members of the Russian delegation who planned to attend various OSCE events, including the upcoming Ministerial Council meeting. Cancelling, right before the event, a visa that had been earlier issued by the Maltese Chairpersonship to Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, allegedly "due to circumstances beyond their control," was unprecedented.

❗️The current institutional crisis within the OSCE was triggered by the destructive actions of a number of Western countries that are using this platform to promote their own agenda in disregard of the fundamental principles underlying the Organisation’s functioning, which must be abided by all participating states regardless of their membership in other international entities. Since 2022, the Ukrainianisation of the OSCE’s agenda has paralysed its activities across the three security dimensions, namely, political and military, economic and environmental, and humanitarian. <...>

🇷🇺 At the meetings of the OSCE’s decision-making bodies - the Permanent Council and the Forum for Security Cooperation - Russian representatives have been regularly raising the most pressing OSCE-related issues, such as combatting terrorism and drug trafficking, protecting traditional values, countering manifestations of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism, preventing the falsification of history, protecting the rights of ethnic minorities and believers, and ensuring access to information. The participating states must unite their efforts in these areas.

The Russian Federation regularly provides objective updates to the participating states’ delegations about the war crimes committed by the Kiev regime, the ongoing all-out campaign in Ukraine to cancel the Russian language and Russian culture, the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and reprisals against the national media. <...>

The OSCE’s specific executive bodies, such as the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM), and the Representative on Freedom of the Media, continue to see major complaints coming their way. These institutions have repeatedly manifested their political bias. The ODIHR stands out distinctly in this context, as it is known for conducting openly biased monitoring of election processes in the countries that lie “east of Vienna” and making advance preparations for “anticipated” conclusions on their outcomes. The Representative on Freedom of the Media is also known for practicing double standards and conspicuous silence when it comes to unfair treatment of non-Western media within the Organisation’s space. Russia does not see the HCNM paying proper attention to matters of oppressing ethnic minorities.

👉 Given the current state of the OSCE, we can hardly talk about it playing any meaningful role amid the ongoing profound reformatting of the world. The organisation would undoubtedly benefit from close cooperation with formats such as the #SCO, #BRICS and the #CIS, which are operating based on fundamentally new approaches.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will hold bilateral meetings with foreign ministers from a number of countries on the sidelines of the Ministerial Council in Valletta.

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🎙 Excerpts from President of Russia Vladimir Putin's remarks at the Plenary Session of the AI Journey international conference

💬 Vladimir Putin: Russia’s experience in the practical implementation of artificial intelligence is needed in various countries. Today, nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, as well as our partners from the #CIS, the Eurasian Economic Union, the #SCO, #BRICS, and other associations are forming promising economic sectors and introducing innovations.

Russia unquestionably shares and supports their commitment to developing, and also supports domestic companies in creating AI-based products and services both for themselves and for the whole world.

We will provide the countries of the Global South and East with consultative and technical assistance in the domain of artificial intelligence. Of course, we hope that we will also borrow our partners’ achievements and implement joint projects based on equal access to knowledge, technology, and scientific achievements. This priority is enshrined in the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.

We are ready to help create and apply generative models not only in Russian, but also in other languages. As I have said, these systems’ algorithms must be trusted, that is, clear, open, and unbiased. They must also be developed considering cultural and national peculiarities of each civilisation with its history, identity and traditions, which we, in Russia, deeply respect.

❗️I am confident that an international alliance of AI National associations and development institutions of the BRICS countries and other interested states will give a boost to this cooperation. This Alliance will be launched at the AI Journey conference today.

I hope that new foreign participants, including my colleagues, leaders of state, will attend this event.