West Pitching 'Our Great Friends' India, China Against Each Other: Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday accused the West of deliberately pitching India and China against each other, whom he referred to as "our great friends". He made the remarks at a meeting of the "Culture without Borders: the Role and Development of Cultural Diplomacy" diplomatic club.
While Lavrov did not explicitly name any specific Western country, his remarks were widely seen as a veiled reference to the United States. "Take note of the current developments in the Asia-Pacific region, which the West has started calling the Indo-Pacific region to give its policy a clear anti-China orientation — expecting thereby to additionally clash our great friends and neighbours India and China," Lavrov said.
A vocal critic of the QUAD grouping (comprising India, Australia, Japan and the US to contain China), Lavrov has muted his criticism since AUKUS, a military alliance of the UK, US, and Australia, was set up. The foreign minister also stated that the West is trying to weaken the role of ASEAN in Asia.
"Western colleagues, as in any other part of the world, want to play a major role here, they want to undermine the central role of ASEAN, which suited everyone for many, many decades and was based on the formation of a unifying space by the ASEAN countries and their partners in dialogue both in the field of politics and in the field of military cooperation, in the field of defence," Lavrov was quoted as saying by TASS.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional alliance of ten Southeast Asian countries focused on fostering economic growth and enhancing security cooperation among its members. The member nations include Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
"The rules of consensus, the search for common ground - all this our Western colleagues are beginning to push aside little by little and are trying to lure some ASEAN members into openly confrontational rather than unifying formats: various troikas, quartets," Lavrov added.
He further went on to call for a collective security arrangement in Eurasia.
"There are no other continents like Eurasia, where so many civilisations coexisted and maintained their identity and relevance in the modern era, and at the same time, Eurasia is the only continent where there is no continent-wide structure. In Eurasia, there is a need for such a unification process so that the interests of many large, truly great powers and civilisations are harmonised," Lavrov said.
He pointed out that while Africa has both sub-regional groups and a continent-wide body like the African Union, and Latin America and the Caribbean are represented by CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), there is currently no comparable regional framework in Eurasia.
(With inputs from news agency PTI.)
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