🎙 Address by Russia's President Vladimir Putin on the start of Russia's BRICS Chairmanship

💬 On January 1, Russia was passed the baton of the #BRICS chairmanship, an association which, according to the decision adopted by the 15th BRICS Summit in August 2022, now includes 10 countries.

Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates joined BRICS as new full members which is a strong indication of the growing authority of the association and its role in international affairs.

BRICS is attracting an ever increasing number of supporters and like-minded countries that share its underlying principles, namely, sovereign equality, respect for the chosen path of development, mutual consideration of interests, openness, consensus, the aspiration to form a multipolar international order and a fair global financial and trade system, and pursuit of collective solutions to top challenges of our time.

The Russian 2024 BRICS Chairmanship under the motto Strengthening Multilateralism for Equitable Global Development and Security will act precisely in this manner and focus on positive and constructive cooperation with all countries concerned.

🔸 We will spare no effort to <...> facilitate the harmonious integration of new participants in all formats of its activities.

🔸 We will start working on the modalities of a new category of BRICS partner country.

🔸 Russia will continue to promote all aspects of the BRICS partnership in three key areas: politics and security, economy and finance, and cultural and humanitarian contacts.

🔸 Our priorities include promoting cooperation in science, high technology, healthcare, environmental protection, culture, sports, youth exchanges, and civil society.

🔸 In total, over 200 events of different levels and types will be held in many Russian cities as part of the chairmanship.

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🇷🇺 Russia assumes CIS chairmanship on January 1, 2024

The Concept for Russia’s chairmanship of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in 2024 has been published.

Russia will chair the Commonwealth of Independent States under the Concept of the Further Development of the CIS, endorsed by a CIS Heads of State Council resolution on December 18, 2020; the Economic Development Strategy of the CIS for the Period up to 2030 adopted by a resolution of the CIS Heads of Government on May 29, 2020, and other CIS fundamental programme documents.

Russia’s chairmanship of the CIS will be aimed at ensuring the continuity of its activities and reaching a number of goals, in part,

👉 to continue strengthening the CIS as an integration association;
👉 increase its international status;
👉 enhancing the CIS’s role as a representative venue for multilateral political dialogue on a broad range of issues;
👉 deepening its economic integration with a view to creating a common economic space;
👉 upgrading the mechanisms for countering, through cooperation, traditional and new challenges and threats to the security of the CIS member-states;
👉 promoting cooperation in the military area and on border security; expanding cultural and humanitarian interaction;
👉 aligning CIS activities with other integration associations with a view to creating a Greater Eurasian Partnership that unites the potential of all states and organisations of the region; and improving the CIS’s contractual and legal foundation and cooperation institutions.

An meaningful part of Russia’s chairmanship will be a support for measures to counter the falsification of history and attempts to rehabilitate Nazism, and to preserve the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War, including the genocide of the Soviet peoples.

In this context, special attention will be paid to preparations for holding the Year of the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War in the CIS in 2025 – the Year of Peace and Unity in the Fight against Nazism.

#Opinion by Maria Zakharova

💬 UK Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps wrote on his X account: “The world has turned its back on Russia, forcing Putin into the humiliation of going cap in hand to North Korea to keep his illegal invasion going. In doing so Russia has broken multiple UNSC resolutions and put the security of another world region at risk. This must stop now. Together with our partners we’ll make sure North Korea pays a high price for supporting Russia.”

1. Is Grant Shapps about to tweet how many UNSC resolutions the UK has breached in the past 50 years? With its invasion of Iraq, for example.

2. What about the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)? Have the ministries in London worked it out? Also, I believe they should shed light on what happened to HMS Sheffield, which sank near the Falklands in 1982. Specifically, whether there were nuclear weapons on board. Let me remind you that in the photos of the Sheffield crew that survived the sinking, the crew members were, oddly enough, wearing radiation protection gear. At the time, Shapps’s predecessors at the Ministry of Defence denied the fact that the warships bound for the islands carried nuclear weapons. But 20 years later, similar to the situation with Iraq, London acknowledged its small lie. A very small one. Britain could no longer deny it and confirmed that the ships had indeed been carrying nuclear weapons in 1982. The official spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence stated that “the weapons were Type WE.177 nuclear depth charges;” they “never entered the territorial waters of the Falkland Islands.” “A decision was taken to transfer them to other ships heading back home.” This should be verified, don’t you think?

3. I understand that poor English education has become a signature mark of the British government. Shapps could perform a simple calculation and subtract the number of NATO countries from the countries representing the Global Majority. Unfortunately, it seems like he struggles with counting.

4. Britain was the largest colonial empire in human history, with its domain spanning across all populated continents. You can learn more about this in our history section and the white book reports about the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons and their allies.

And since Shapps’s jab was specifically about North Korea, I must mention the bloody war on the Korean Peninsula that Great Britain contributed to as part of the so-called UN forces.

Here is just a brief list of London’s modern-time neo-colonial campaigns: British ground and air forces participated, alongside the Americans, in the aggression against Yugoslavia and the destruction of Iraq (see par. 1) and its population, as well as Libya, Afghanistan, the bombing of Syria and most recently – the support for the Kiev regime provided by the Anglo-Saxons in violation of all resolutions on non-supplying lethal weapons to conflict zones.

There is one thing that Shapps got right: “This must stop now.”

https://t.me/MariaVladimirovnaZakharova/6856

☦️ Heartfelt congratulations to all Christians, in Russia and abroad, who celebrate Orthodox Christmas on January 7.

🙏 Love, well-being and best wishes!

#Christmas2023 #OrthodoxChristmas

Good morning, India! 🌅 शुभ प्रभात, भारत!

📸 Can you guess the location?

#Outcomes2023

⚡️On January 18 at 11 am, the Foreign Ministry Press Centre will host a news conference by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the 2023 Russian diplomacy results.

Russian and foreign media representatives are invited.

Accreditation is open until 12 noon on January 15.

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