- Wednesday, January 15, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov found himself in an awkward position at the Raisina Dialogue talks in India on Saturday (4) when he remarked that the ongoing war in Ukraine was “launched against” his country. He also said that Moscow was trying to stop the war.
The 72-year-old Lavrov arrived in New Delhi on February 28 to take part in the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting and the Raisina Dialogue, a premier conference on geopolitics and geoeconomics.
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” the diplomat said, according to a Guardian report, seeing some in the audience laugh. It made Lavrov stop and stumble on his words.
“And the blunt way to describe what changed: we would not any more rely on any partners in the west. We would not allow them to blow the pipelines again,” Lavor continued in a reference to the blasts that affected the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea last September.
Russia, led by president Vladimir Putin, launched an invasion of Ukraine on February 24, in what the leader called a “special military operation”.
However, the audience did not laugh at every word that Lavrov uttered. He also had his moment of appreciation when he responded to the “double standard” of western military intervention.
“Have you been interested in these years in what is going on in Iraq, what is going on in Afghanistan? Have you been asking the United States and Nato whether they are certain of what they are doing?” he asked, according to the Guardian report.
Lavrov had a word with his US counterpart Antony Blinken at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting where the latter told him that Washington would not back down in its support for Kyiv.
India, which has been a time-tested friend of Russia, has remained neutral on the Ukraine war.
While it has abstained from voting in United Nations resolutions condemning Russia’s adventure in Ukraine, it has also increased its imports of oil from Russia after the west imposed sanctions against the Kremlin.
