Russia’s position is the opposite of that of the US regarding the conflict between Israel and the current tensions in the Middle East. This was made clear yesterday by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, during a press conference for the rebalancing of Russian diplomacy in 2023.
Lavrov called the White House’s justifications for bombing Houthi positions in Yemen “pathetic”, and compared the American attack to what happened in Libya in 2011, referring to the military intervention that, under the under the auspices of the United Nations, took place shortly after the start of the civil war in the North African country.
“Washington’s justifications seem, I would say, very pathetic,” he said. Lavrov urged the US to stop what he called “aggression” against this country in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, next to the Red Sea. “The most important thing now is to stop the aggression against Yemen, because the more the Americans and the British bomb, the less the Houthis will want to talk,” said Lavrov.
The Russian foreign minister also criticized the United States and its allies when he spoke about Ukraine. According to him, the West is trying to maintain its global domination and military supremacy, which is why it does not want to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. “We don’t see the slightest interest from the US or NATO to regulate the Ukrainian conflict and to listen to Russian concerns,” he said.
In this context, he added, it is impossible for Moscow and Washington to resume contacts on nuclear weapons control. The American side had proposed to separate the two affairs to talk about “strategic stability” again, something that the Russian does not agree with.
The absence of dialogue is relevant because the only nuclear reduction agreement still in force between the two powers, Start III (or New Start), expires in February 2026, and Russia also suspended its participation in it in February of 2023.
Moscow also believes that increasingly frequent Ukrainian attacks and increasingly inside Russian territory are driven by its Western allies in Kyiv. The West wants no constructive solution when it pushes Ukraine to attack the Crimean peninsula and other Russian territories, Lavrov assured.
In the last week of 2023 and the first of 2024, the exchange of airstrikes between Russia and Ukraine was very intense. One of the Ukrainian offensives was the deadliest against Russian territory in this war, which is already approaching its two-year mark. It targeted the city of Belgorod and killed 25 civilians on December 30, the day after a Russian offensive against several Ukrainian cities killed 55.
The West, he accused, “points towards an escalation of the Ukrainian crisis”, which leads, in his opinion, to creating “strategic risks and additional dangers”.
