In the Brezhnev era, there was a viral joke about the Soviet Foreign Ministry employees.
A professor at the Academy of Diplomacy comments on undergrads’ home assignment.
The topic was a letter of protest.
In particular, he heaped praises on student Ivanov’s letter, except he notices the guy had misspelt two expletives.
Back in the day, it was a funny joke.
Over time, though, the joke turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On Putin’s watch, the language of Russian diplomats has devolved into one of the underworld.
Their behavior is more reminiscent of that exhibited by hoodlums, too.
Here’s a bunch of quotes for you.
“Just look at me! Straight in the eye! Don’t look away!”
Or this: “Go interview the peacocks!”
To be fair, they occasionally do have a flair for a fancy turn of speech, like,
“Pardon the language, but we don’t give two s__ts about the Western sanctions.”
Russia’s top-tier foreign agency officials don’t just indulge in fruity language when talking with the media.
They use it to address their Western counterparts, too.
We’re witnessing a full-bore degradation of the once-respectable agency together with its chief.
With this woeful trend in mind, our team has psyched itself up to listen to Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
addressing the U.N. Security Council meeting.
We’ve gone through the unedited version and tried to figure out why our diplomatic agency is so obsessed with expletives,
when it doesn’t give a s__t, and when it does so much so it tells its counterparts to go f__k themselves.
THE ORIGIN OF THE GLOBAL WOES
Minister Lavrov started out with a bit of history.
How couldn’t he? Lavrov brought up the great victory of 1945 and declared the results of WW2
as the major source of the current international law.
You getting his drift?
Things change, except the ancient history that are the results of WW2.
The U.N. Charter itself is on Lavrov’s side.
Also, this organization shouldn’t be reformed, either.
Which is understandable. The U.N.’s current config favors Russia. It has veto power.
The aggressor state is wielding it, that is. That’s why Lavrov will do whatever it takes to keep things the way they are.
<...> from the ruins of World War II and resulted from this tremendous tragedy.
The U.N. Charter served as its foundation, as the key source of present-day international law.
It is largely thanks to the United Nations that a new world war leading to a nuclear catastrophe has been averted.
The minister then tackled his favorite topic: the origin of the global woes and threats.
Surprise-surprise, he blamed the collective West spearheaded by the U.S., of course.
The Americans have been brazen enough to appropriate the right to be the humanity’s chief arbiter.
The rueful implication here may well be that this role should belong to the greatness-deficient Russia.
And the minister apparently laments this fact.
Unfortunately, when the Cold War came to an end,
the U.S.-led so-called collective West appropriated the right to rule the destinies of the entire humankind and,
driven by its exceptionalism complex, started ignoring the legacy of the U.N. founding fathers
more often and on an increasingly greater scale.
Lavrov was bashing the collective West with a ferocity of a true warrior.
He torched its “vested geopolitical needs,” the global security being “thrown off-balance,”
and new “hotbeds of tension” being created.
Russia has been busting its chops to rectify this global madness and ensure that the
“events unfold in a peaceful manner,” while the U.S. keeps beating their drum and foiling our efforts.
Today, the West makes selective use of the Charter’s norms and principles, on a case-by-case basis,
and only when they serve its vested geopolitical needs.
This inevitably throws global stability off-balance, exacerbating the existing hotbeds of tension and creating new ones,
which in turn raises the specter of a global conflict in the process.
Seeking to offset these risks and ensure that events unfold in a peaceful manner,
Russia has been insisting and keeps insisting that
all the provisions of the U.N. Charter be respected and carried out in full
and with due regard for their interconnected nature, rather than selectively,
including the principles of the sovereign equality of states, non-interference in their domestic affairs,
respect for territorial integrity and the right of people to self-determination.
And it didn’t happen overnight.
It all goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Oddly enough, Minister Lavrov didn’t blame it on the U.S. He must’ve missed the paragraph.
On the other hand, the minister slammed the U.S. for meddling in Ukraine’s domestic affairs.
In case you missed this episode, Washington was behind the Ukrainian crisis.
In 2005, the West staged a coup in Kyiv and helped install the pro-U.S. puppet president Viktor Yushchenko,
while the Moscow-backed horse Viktor Yanukovych was smoked.
In all fairness, Viktor Yanukovych eventually won the presidency in 2010,
with global puppet-masters apparently failing to thwart his victory.
But Lavrov slurred it over.
On the flip side, the Minister took the trouble to describe the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine.
Predictably, none other than the Americans ignited the ruckus.
Ukrainians couldn’t have come up with an idea to rebel.
It was the same Victoria Nuland who discussed the future cabinet to be formed by the putsch perpetrators
with the U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv.
At the same time, she showed where the European Union actually belongs, in Washington’s thinking,
on the international political stage.
We remember the two words she said, and it is quite telling that the European Union swallowed it.
The minister then switched gears.
As ordered by their masters from across the pond, the victorious Ukrainian rebels began
terrorizing the Russian-speaking population.
That’s the real origin story and that’s the root of all evil.
Western diplomats are now trying hard to blur the focus and bring up Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
But Lavrov slammed the door shut with a killer rebuttal.
The power in Ukraine was seized by neo-Nazis who naturally couldn’t represent the interests of Crimea and the Donbas.
“This requires no evidence,” Lavrov stressed.
There we go! Full-blown Nazis! And since that was the case, whatever Kyiv’s regime does is,
by definition, in breach of the law.
Therefore, it follows that Russia’s aggression is a noble cause and nothing short of a sacred mission.
Then his rant took a turn for the worse. What do you mean restoring the 1991 borders? Lavrov was indignant.
The Nazis would exterminate the entire Russian-language population, whether physically or legally.
Long story short, should Russia liberate the occupied Ukrainian provinces,
the propaganda will blow the lid off multiple instances of Russian-speaking boys being executed by the Nazis.
The West encourages Kyiv’s racist policies, after all.
Moreover, it’s not the first time that the Western partners are offering this peace formula.
If Lavrov is to be believed, the governments in Latvia and Estonia keep stomping
on the rights of 100s of thousands of Russian-speaking residents, cheerled by the E.U. and NATO.
Similarly, the E.U. and NATO have been encouraging Latvia and Estonia for decades in their efforts
to deny hundreds of thousands of Russian speakers their rights by designating them as non-citizens.
They are now seriously discussing introducing criminal liability for using one’s native tongue.
This remark wasn’t at all off-topic, so much so that Lavrov had to articulate the return to the agenda.
But getting back to Ukraine…
So, Lavrov got back to Ukraine and lambasted the West that allegedly had blown the Minsk Agreements.
Like, no one but Putin was ever intent on observing the accords. The West was just biding its time.
The vows given by the leaders of Germany and France proved to be a load of hot air.
So, the Russian president was out of options. No cap.
However, last year, all those who signed the Minsk Agreements, apart from Vladimir Putin,
i.e., Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, and Petro Poroshenko, all recognized in public
and with a certain degree of satisfaction that they had no intention of fulfilling this document when they signed it.
In fact, all they wanted was to win some time to reinforce Ukraine’s military capabilities
and supply it with more weapons for countering Russia.
Then, Lavrov proceeded to cite Andrei Gromyko, the once-Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union,
as saying, “ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war.”
However, he failed to explain why Russia opted to start the war instead of following through with the talks.
Instead, he once again went ballistic about the West.
WE’RE CONSTANTLY LIED TO
After that, the minister highlighted the importance of negotiations.
According to him, Russia is ready to hold talks with Ukraine. Except maybe on its own terms.
Mr. Putin himself doesn’t mind, which is ostensibly a big deal.
However, Mr. Zelenskyy signed a decree that banned any attempt at negotiating with Putin’s government.
He even doesn’t want to meet with Putin. A crummy Zelenskyy vs. the president of the great state.
So why wouldn’t the U.S. prod their puppet? Apparently, they don’t want to.
If the United States is interested in such talks, I think it only needs to give the signal for Zelenskyy’s order to be canceled.
Worse still, the only thing our Western opponents are doing is hurl offensive epithets our way,
like “invasion, aggression, and annexation.”
How come Russia is the aggressor? We won WW2, for goodness sake.
Stay out of rewriting history — or the U.N.Charter, for that matter.
Long story short, we could just chew the rag over our contribution to the defeat of fascism, and that would be it.
The Russian army would stay in the occupied provinces. This kind of negotiation would be a blast.
But the West doesn’t want this consensus as if Ukraine was the center of the universe.
It’s just the West can’t build a strong case against our Putin guy.
Western reps shy away from professional discussions.
Otherwise, this lop-sided battle would blow the cover off their demagogue rhetoric. They’ve just chickened out.
Today, the rhetoric of our opponents is full of slogans such as “invasion,” “aggression,” and “annexation.”
They do not say a word about the inner reasons for the problem,
or the fact that for many years they nurtured a downright Nazi regime, which is openly rewriting
the results of World War II and the history of their own people.
The West does not want to hold a substantial discussion based on facts and respect for
all the requirements of the U.N. Charter, probably because they have no arguments for an honest dialogue.
One gets a strong impression that Western representatives are afraid of professional discussions
where their empty rhetoric can be exposed.
Staying on the subject of Western demagogues being incapable of a reasonable conversation,
Lavrov leapt toward the remote Chagos Archipelago and far-flung Pacific islands.
Pursuant to the U.N. ruling, France was to return Mayotte to the Comoro Islands. Guess what? It didn’t.
The U.K. flouted the U.N. orders, too, as it stayed in Chagos.
With this in mind, how can anyone demand that Russia observe Ukraine’s territorial integrity,
seeing as the country is engulfed in the flames of a civil war fanned by the West?
Leave us alone. You’re bending your U.N. principles the way you please.
Lavrov contrasted the ill-intentioned West with today’s beautiful Russia.
Along with the other CSTO members, it rooted for the cooperation with NATO, safeguarded global security,
and religiously observed the U.N. principles.
A doozy of a state! But what did we get in return? Hubris and deception.
If NATO had not rejected the CSTO’s offers of cooperation, this could have likely prevented many
of the negative processes that have led to the current European crisis because
they refused to listen to Russia or deceived it for decades.
According to Lavrov, Russia keeps promoting “effective multilateralism” and equal partnerships.
Unlike the West that’s genetically averse to it.
“One shocking example of the phrase by Josep Borrel, who said that ‘Europe is a garden [and] most of the rest
of the world is a jungle.’
It is a clear neocolonial syndrome,” Lavrov laments.
The U.S. and its allies are doing their utmost to “hinder efforts to make international relations more democratic”
by using sanctions to browbeat those who beg to disagree in what appears
to be a gross violation of the U.N. Charter-mandated procedures and articles.
The brazen West is too self-indulgent.
Like, it doesn’t like autocracies that don’t guarantee global stability. It’s hellbent on robust democracies.
Look at what these self-avowed democrats have done to Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and many other countries.
How dare you invoke our authoritarian rule and blame the Ukrainian events on us.
And I’m quoting, “autocratic leadership is not a guarantor of stability; it is a catalyst of chaos and conflict,”
whereas “strong democratic societies are places that are capable of self-correction — and self-improvement.
They can enable change — even radical change — without bloodshed and violence.”
This brings to mind the “changes” that resulted from the actions of “strong democratic societies”
in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and many other countries.
Lavrov also took a swipe at the Alliance for Multilateralism.
According to him, only those who agree with the E.U. 's precepts and policies are welcome there,
while the rest aren’t invited to join the Alliance or the E.U. or any other associations.
Just think about it. That’s Colonialism 101.
Lavrov must have wanted the E.U. to offer memberships to Russia or, say, North Korea.
They would teach Europeans a harsh lesson or two. Instead, they are turning to riff-raff.
Like Ukraine. “Serbia, Turkey and other candidates can wait,
but a Nazi regime can be admitted out of turn,” said the minister.
Those behind these decisions “claim the role of the ideologist of European integration.”
Shame on them! By the way, did I mention that Ukraine is governed by the Nazis,
a gang of Russophobes that seized power?
It doesn’t make sense to admit the Kyiv regime into the E.U. That’s Lavrov’s take.
I suggest comparing that thesis with the “achievements” of the Kyiv regime,
which launched a war against a large part of its own people …
There you have it.
We were dumb enough to think it’s Russia that’s waging this war. But we were wrong all along.
The bottomline is, Lavrov slapped the West with the question:
For how long will you be dividing the humanity into democracies and autocracies?
Come on! The example of a true democracy is Russia. A sovereign brand, unlike Ukraine.
YOU’RE THE ABUSERS
Lavrov’s address at the U.N. The Security Council meeting was preceded by President Zelenskyy’s speech.
He stressed that the aggressor state (meaning Russia) exercising the veto power is unacceptable.
Russia’s Foreign Minister was in a tough spot.
On the one hand, he had to react to this jab, but Lavrov didn’t want to design to address Zelenskyy.
He didn’t even mention the word “president” when referring to Zelenskyy in his speech.
“The Nazi regime,” “the putsch perpetrators,” and so on. So he had to slither his way out of the predicament.
That’s when Lavrov accused, lo and behold, the West of abusing the veto power. And there we go again.
Western countries were characterized as the ones aggressively peddling and abusing something
as well as provoking and prodding someone.
But this doesn’t pose a challenge to Russia. Its immaculately white stance is impervious to this kind of smear.
We’re reasonably exercising the veto power.
Instead of questioning our veto, you’d better scrutinize the instances of the U.N. rulings that haven’t been enforced.
Like, the Palestine-related resolution.
Or a minefield of issues across the Middle East and North Africa.
As for the sanctions, on top of those approved by the U.N., the U.S.
and its allies are imposing additional ones targeting specific nations while we’re suffering.
That’s bad, folks.
Long story short, sanctions require extra scrutiny. Even though they benefit Russia, Lavrov is seriously concerned.
Furthermore, all sanctions regimes adopted by the UN Security Council should have an expiry date, because
the lack of a deadline is undermining the council’s flexibility
when it comes to the ability to influence the policies of sanctioned governments.
Finally, Lavrov concluded that the international relations are at a nadir.
The West has no intention or political will to fix things.
They are intent on establishing their world order.
But we won’t let it happen.
We’ve been swearing by the U.N. Charter for nigh 80 years, and are looking forward to at least 80 more.
It includes a lot of cool stuff like equality, a polycentric world, safe and sustainable development,
and respect toward sovereign states, whether large or rich, whether monarchies or republics.
Except it doesn’t hamper the aggressors, however large or rich, from doing their own thing.
But Lavrov overlooked that fact.
It’s essential for Russia to keep the 1945 status quo as its core value and retain its U.N. role as a “great power.”
So, observe the Charter, and your well-being will be off-the-charts.
Russia was in a good position to be a well-respected and influential country.
But Putin’s and his aides’ wise leadership has landed us in this mess.
The U.N. speeches delivered by the Foreign Minister smack of those that could be uttered by a North Korean official.
It’s a disgrace.
That’s the way the Russian diplomacy has been degraded.
We could offer a profoundly serious take on it, but we won’t. The role of laughing stock fits it better.
See you tomorrow!