Lavrov: West trying to drive wedges into relations between CSTO members in order to maintain its dominance

The collective West is obsessed with self-righteousness, maintaining its hegemony in the international arena and implementing its own rules that undermine international law – as stated to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after today’s meeting of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko with the CSTO foreign ministers

Mr. Lavrov stressed that the CSTO, as well as the SCO and BRICS, is now viewed by the West as a threat to its dominance on the world stage since these are emerging centres of the future multipolar world order.

“In this regard, we witness desperate aggressive actions by the West to split the CSTO, as well as the SCO, BRICS and other structures independent of it. There are also attempts to drive wedges into relations between the CSTO members. Our general conclusion is that it is necessary to resist this pressure, to fulfil the allied obligations in full, and to strengthen solidarity. The President of Belarus stressed that this is due not only to the allied, moral duty, but also should be guided by purely pragmatic interests. In the end, we will all live together within the CSTO, CIS, EEA and Union State and solve our problems jointly. We will not stay away from each other. Meanwhile, the West – as it has repeatedly done in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Ukraine – simply abandons a situation it has created and, as soon as its interest runs out, leaves the relevant territories in a devastated and dangerous state. Therefore, the CSTO is in a very important period now, and Belarus' chairmanship in the organisation significantly helps to look at the situation correctly, assess it and work out a way forward,” the Foreign Minister of Russia said.