Moscow appreciates Beijing’s support in its efforts to uphold Russia’s principal approaches to the formation of Europe’s security architecture and values China’s stance regarding the situation in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
“We highly appreciate the balanced and unbiased stance of our Chinese friends regarding the situation in and around Ukraine,” Lavrov said in a video address to participants of the ‘Russia and China: Cooperation in a New Era’ conference.
“We are supported by Beijing in efforts to defend Russia’s principal approaches to the security architecture formation in Europe,” he continued.
Constructive approach
According to Lavrov, tectonic shifts in the modern geopolitical landscape serve as a catalyst for deepening joint foreign policy coordination between Moscow and Beijing.
“Together with our friends from China, we maintain a constructive approach in building relations with third-party countries,” he noted. “At the same time, our positions on the vast majority of key issues on the global and regional agenda either coincide or are extremely close.”
The Russian minister stressed that Moscow and Beijing jointly favor strengthening the coordinating role of the UN in global affairs, adherence to the fundamental principle of equal and indivisible security, which implies not strengthening one’s own security at the expense of others.
“We are united with our Chinese friends by our drive towards the democratization of international life so that the voices of all countries – whether large or small – are heard, and a narrow clique of the Western countries led by the United States, will no longer be able to dictate to the world its own rules of the game,” he said. “We reject all illegitimate and unilateral sanctions as an unscrupulous instrument of political diktat.”
Lavrov also noted that “the philosophy of dialogue and mutually-equal cooperation shared by Russia and China are at the heart of the ‘Global Security Initiative,’ voiced by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the opening of the Boao Forum for Asia’s annual conference [in China] on April 21. Moscow and Beijing are doing their utmost to fight against terrorism and extremism.”
“We are working hard in the name of a political and diplomatic solution to such important global issues as the Iranian nuclear program, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and the settlement of the conflict in Syria and Afghanistan,” Russia’s top diplomat continued.
Lavrov also spotlighted the significance of successfully maintaining cooperation between Moscow and Beijing in various multilateral formats.
“Our countries are closely coordinating their positions in the United Nations, the G20, the SCO [the Shanghai Cooperation Organization], BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa], APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] and on other international platforms,” Lavrov stated. “Special attention is being paid to bolstering regional integration processes, particularly within the framework of the EAEU [the Eurasian Economic Union] and China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative.”
According to him, it all provides for the enhancement of interaction in the Asian-Pacific and Eurasian regions, the formation of the Greater Eurasian Partnership in the interests of the regional infrastructure’s further development and stable economic growth on the shared continent.
