🎙 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement following a high-level Plenary Session of the 3rd Minsk International Conference on Eurasian Security (Minsk, October 28, 2025)

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💬 Sergey Lavrov: The conference is steadily moving towards becoming a promising discussion and expert platform to develop concrete recommendations. From my standpoint, the fact that delegates from public authorities, as well as experts, political scientists, and civil society figures have come together for this event is important and makes it possible to leverage ideas coming from civil society that genuinely resonate with the people.

An increasing number of people across the Eurasian continent recognise the importance of removing obstacles that are being artificially put up on the way towards sustainable, independent, and effective economic growth, improvements in the social sphere, and logistical infrastructure of this vast and resource-rich continent.

President Lukashenko’s speech was followed by speeches delivered by foreign ministers of Hungary, Myanmar, and the DPRK, as well as the Special Representative of China for Eurasian Affairs. Still to come are speeches by ranking representatives from India, Iran, the UAE, Cambodia, and secretaries general of the #SCO, the #CSTO, and the #CICA. Over time, these integration groups will, through the natural process of restoring connections and developing joint projects, eventually become part of Eurasian architecture relying on an economic foundation and a logistical dimension, which is a solid basis for building security architecture.

Forty-eight delegations are represented here. The participants will use various panels to discuss every angle of the pressing goals of Eurasian development.

We are doing our best to promote President Putin’s initiative to create Eurasian security architecture within the context of our efforts to create the Greater Eurasian Partnership. We are using this tentative term to make sure the continent has platforms it can use to freely discuss, examine and bounce ideas off one another.

You may have heard our statement. Many in the West recognise the importance of Eurasia, but the problem is that Western countries, primarily, NATO members are not ready to engage on an equal footing or to seek forms of pan-continental cooperation based on equality and indivisible security across our common geopolitical space.

On the contrary, they want NATO bodies to spread across the entire continent, including the Pacific, where NATO seeks to create military-political alliance-like closed blocs with a limited number of participants, thus eroding the universal and open architecture that it took the ASEAN countries decades to build. All interested countries were welcome to be part of that architecture and use its various mechanisms.

Efforts are being deployed to reverse this process and to subordinate ongoing developments in Eurasia to the interests of the North Atlantic Alliance. These interests are, above all, about containing China, Russia, and the DPRK and, in the long run, any other country that may wish to assert its right to pursue an independent policy based on national interests.

In closing, I would like to point out that our Belarusian friends have put forward an initiative to draft a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. We strongly support this idea. Several countries said they were willing to participate in drafting this document. This process will take time, but the goal has been set, and a growing number of countries share it. We will keep moving towards this goal.

On National Unity Day, Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the monument to Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky in Moscow's Red Square

The traditional ceremony brought together representatives of religious denominations and members of public and youth organisations.

Celebrated on November 4, National Unity Day marks the liberation of Moscow from foreign invaders by the people's volunteer army led by Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky in 1612.