Western powers are going through the “painful” process of learning of their loss of influence, Russia’s top diplomat said Friday.
“I think that we are in the post-West world order,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Channel 4 News, a British outlet.
That’s a slightly-blunter assessment of global affairs than Lavrov offered even in 2017, when he said first that a “choice” should “be made in favor of building a democratic and fair world order, a post-West world order.” Lavrov’s latest pronouncement updated that call, as he declared an end of the five-century “historical epoch” of Western world domination. And he cited that changing in the hard-to-explain current tension between Russia and the West.
“Their interest is to punish Russia, to downgrade Russia,” he said.
“It is very painful to lose half millennium of domination in the world affairs. In a nutshell this is the answer,” Lavrov replied when asked to explain his assertion. “This is not the criticism, this is a statement of fact. I understand when people used to call the shots in India, Africa, Asia, elsewhere and now they understand that this time has passed.”
The U.S. and the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia following the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. They applied additional sanctions after a Malaysian passenger jet was shot down over Ukraine. A Dutch-led investigation concluded that the plane was targeted by a Russian military surface-to-air missile system, killing 298 civilians. And then in 2017, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia stemming from the cyber attacks against the Democratic Party in 2016 and Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Lavrov reiterated Russia’s denial of involvement in the cyber attacks, which led to Democratic National Committee emails and Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s emails being released by WikiLeaks throughout the general election. He recalled that then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, when asked for proof of Russia’s involvement, replied by saying “your special services, your security people know everything — ask them.”
“To answer the way in which he did, I believe that it is not mature,” Lavrov added. “It is very childish, I think.”
Western officials have maintained that Russia must relinquish territory taken from Ukraine in order to see a normalization of diplomatic relations; otherwise, they risk acquiescing to “the first gunpoint land grab in Europe since the end of World War II,” as a former NATO official has described it.
But Lavrov said that the sanctions are really just an attempt by Western powers to maintain their global position.
“Certainly, after five or so centuries of domination of the collective West, as it were, it is not very easy to adjust to new realities that there are other powerhouses economically, financially and politically, China, India, Brazil,” he said. “Well, Russia certainly would like to be an independent world player. Independent in the sense that we do not want to violate and international law and norms, but the decisions, which we would be taking on the basis of international law, would not be influenced by pressure, money, sanctions, threats or anything else.”
