Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the 31st Meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council, Valletta, December 5, 2024

Thank you, Mr Chairman-in-Office.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Funnily enough, exactly 35 years ago, Malta hosted the famous summit, which, in historians’ assessment, ended the Cold War and ushered in an era of lasting peace and cooperation between East and West.

There are other anniversaries to be marked soon. The 50th anniversary of signing the Final Act is only a few days away – a document designed to forever eliminate the threat of war in Europe, which has been home to one of the greatest civilisations as well as a scene of some of the most devastating conflicts in human history.

The nations that gathered in Helsinki in 1975 put the principle of indivisible security at the centre of their effort to end confrontation, agreeing that the security of one nation is inseparable from other countries in its region, that no country shall strengthen its security at the expense of others, and no country or organisation shall claim dominance in Europe. The document also proclaimed the comprehensive nature of security, which was to be approached through the politico-military, the economic and environmental, and the human dimensions. Everyone solemnly swore an oath to consensus, the cornerstone of the OSCE.

Between the 1975 Security Conference and today lies an enormous gap – a chasm, in fact. Over that time, the progress towards implementing the inviolable principles this forum was created to promote, and which all of us have pledged to implement rigorously (irrespective of membership of other supranational entities) was halted to be later reversed and give way to a rules-based international order, with new ideological, political, military and economic rules, and values.

Life has shown that for NATO and the EU, the Helsinki principles are a valueless scrap of paper. They consider it a burden to respect and apply them, while forcing others to fulfil them, selectively, but only to the extent that suits the West and its interests. Declaring Russia a threat and pursuing Russophobic policies is now seen as an absolution for the most egregious violations of international law.

The West’s resolve to press for its neo-colonial hegemony by any means culminated in the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, the dismemberment of a state in the centre of Europe, and has now manifested again, in the Ukrainian conflict they incited to contain Russia and inflict a “strategic defeat” on our country on the battlefield.

In its time, the Helsinki spirit was seen as a barometer of détente, with the arms control instruments first proposed in the late 1980s providing a solid foundation for it. The underlying idea was to dismantle the material legacy of the Cold War and build up mutual trust, to provide more security with less capabilities, to stop wasting enormous resources on the risk of a pointless and self-destructive military confrontation, and to join forces in countering cross-border challenges and threats.

This course of action was codified in the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Forum for Security Co-operation initiative, the Immediate Action Programme and other fundamental OSCE documents governing diverse aspects of military development and military behaviour.

However, the United States and its allies have dumped it all, just like the ABM and the INF treaties. The question is: what for? The answer is clear: to satisfy the desire to bring NATO back to the political centre stage. After the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan, they needed a new enemy to coalesce around. As a result, we saw a reincarnation of the Cold War, only this time with a much greater risk of it evolving into a hot phase. Borders wrapped in barbed wire, anti-tank ditches, standing in line for the right to have foreign troops (preferably American) deployed on one’s territory is the perfect image of security for those who declared themselves “frontline states” fighting against the “Russian threat.”

The same unenviable fate befell the economic and environmental dimension of the OSCE, which was supposed to be a mechanism for harmonising the interests of all participating states. However, the West trampled upon the OSCE principles and embarked on a path of suppressing its competitors by means of economic and social coercion and imposing illegitimate sanctions on Russia, Belarus and any other country for that matter that dares to uphold its legitimate national interests.

Things are even worse in the third “basket,” which is chock-full of pseudo-liberal “values,” notably, without any consensus whatsoever. Generally speaking, the “values” theme has also been turned into a tool of diktat. The fundamental goals, such as promoting tolerance and intercultural dialogue, access to information, combatting the manifestations of neo-Nazism, Islamophobia and Christianophobia, protecting the rights of ethnic minorities and believers - have been wiped out from the Organisation’s agenda.

The Western countries, the Chairmanship, the Secretary General, and all OSCE institutions, which never miss an opportunity to show their concern for human rights, are keeping deathly silence while watching the Nazi regime in Kiev, which since 2017 has adopted a series of laws annihilating the Russian language in every sphere, including education, media, culture, and art, and recently outlawed the canonical UOC, do what it’s doing. This is despite the fact that Article 1 of the UN Charter requires respect for the linguistic and religious rights of every individual. But EU leaders are only saying that Zelensky’s regime is upholding “European values.” This is nothing short of handing oneself in and admitting that racism is now a “European value.”

One would think that given the ongoing profound changes in the balance of global forces, the OSCE could become a focal point reflecting the interests of all members of the European space. However, no one in this audience would ever think of using the OSCE for this purpose. NATO and EU members would never think of doing that, because they have pushed the OSCE to the sidelines of political processes, and for us and everyone else, because such an OSCE makes no sense. There is no room for cooperation or security in real politics within the OSCE.

There is not a single sphere in which the OSCE could play even a marginally useful role in finding answers to direct questions within its terms of reference. Does the investigation of the terrorist attack on the Nord Stream pipelines not fall within the remit of the first and second “baskets?” Does the abolition of the rights of ethnic minorities and the banning of all Russian-language media in Ukraine not worry the institutions of the once respected organisation? Perhaps, the OSCE could ask the Kiev regime to publish the names of those whose bodies were neatly laid out in the streets of Bucha in April 2022 and presented to the world by the BBC correspondents who happened to be around so conveniently? We have made this request many times both to journalists accredited to the United Nations and to Secretary-General Guterres. They usually look bashfully the other way. Perhaps, the OSCE could help us locate the truth? After all, it has had special, albeit not entirely legitimate, ties with the Kiev regime since the time of the special monitoring mission, when that mission covered up its crimes.

The West has manipulated its way into privatising the OSCE Secretariat, just like it did with regard to the executive bodies of the United Nations and many other multilateral organisations. It has never had any respect for the principle of consensus, which it began to destroy decades ago, first, as an exception in the case of the ODIHR, under the motto of the Office’s “autonomy”, which has never been agreed upon by anyone. Then, it continued by abusing the atavisms of the Vienna and Moscow mechanisms, which were created in an entirely different era of “smiles and hugs,” which were completely fake, as is now clear to everyone.

The latest example is the outrageous mockery by the Danish Chairmanship of the Forum for Security Cooperation of the universally agreed rules of procedure. The desecration of the functions of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office when Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s visa was cancelled at the last minute is part of the same string of events.

Another trick they use to break the consensus is the refusal to reach an agreement on rules for funding extrabudgetary projects. Western countries, without any consultation with other countries, simply allocate funds for confrontational events that play into their hand, and the obedient Secretariat hangs out an OSCE “plaque” on them.

I have a serious warning to make: the OSCE exists only as long as there is consensus and as long as each country is guaranteed to have its interests taken into account. Now, there is neither consensus, nor guarantees left.

The OSCE is a victim of the policy of subordinating Europe to the United States through Euro-Atlantic security concepts. NATO and Europe alone are not enough for Washington; it has now brought both the EU and the OSCE Secretariat to its heel. However, this is not the limit, either: the Biden administration is moving NATO’s infrastructure to the Asia-Pacific region, and military blocs with a nuclear component are being created there. Military exercises with NATO participation are being stepped up in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and around the Korean Peninsula. We are witnessing a clear attempt to destabilise the entire Eurasian continent.

We must prevent the tragedies of many countries from Afghanistan to Haiti from replaying in the Asia-Pacific region. In those countries, Uncle Sam came, wreaked havoc and then watched what happened and forced others to clean up his mess. We are convinced that the “regional solutions to regional problems” principle is a viable alternative for Eurasia. The countries of the continent must determine their own future. The objective and inexorable course of history puts responsible politicians under obligation to think about the future of their nations. In addition to ideological considerations that neoliberals are so enamoured with, the everyday interests of voters should be taken into account as well. For example, the cost of energy in Europe is three to four times higher than in the United States. The Euro-Atlantic region is losing its status as the engine of global development. The United States has used Europe, and has now turned its focus to the Asia-Pacific region in an effort to maximise the neo-colonial rent.

The principles of sovereign equality of states and mutually respectful dialogue which were killed in the OSCE get embodied in projects of mutually beneficial cooperation within the SCO, the CIS, the EAEU, the CSTO, Union State of Russia and Belarus, and other Eurasian associations that are not related to the OSCE. There are no “teachers” and “disciples,” no neo-colonial practices, no ideology-driven approaches such as “he who is not with us is against us.” Instead, there is mutual respect and a push to seek a fair balance of interests.

The growing interest in such equitable alliances was clearly seen during the BRICS summit in Kazan and the recent Second International Conference on Eurasian Security in Minsk. As a result, Russia and Belarus have put forward an initiative to draft a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. We would welcome the involvement in this work of all countries located in Eurasia that value the goals of indivisible security, which proved unattainable in the bankrupt Euro-Atlantic configurations.

I am convinced that the future lies in a pan-Eurasian architecture that is open to all countries of the continent and embodies a new polycentric state of the world. It is sad to see the OSCE leadership and those who manipulate it deliberately leave this organisation outside the framework of creative work and the objective course of history. However, every country in Eurasia has its own sovereign national choice to make.