🎙 Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with Marina Kim for the New World project (Moscow, November 14, 2024)

Key talking points:

#InternationalAffairs

• Our main task now is to achieve all the goals formulated by President Vladimir Putin. You are aware of the West’s expectations. They are speculating about stopping the hostilities at a certain line and coordinating a truce, so that 10 years from now they will decide who Crimea and Donbass belong to. This is coffee cup reading. I won’t engage in it. We have our tasks, and we will fulfil them.

• Our job is to assert and promote Russia’s interests in keeping with its Constitution as well as the objectives defined by President Vladimir Putin. This goes beyond Ukraine and applies to Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept in general.

#USA

• Washington can’t allow Russia to prove that it is a strong player and undermine the West’s reputation. They don’t care about Ukraine. They only care about their reputation. They decided that Ukraine should have a government they like and didn’t expect anyone to protest. Russia? It’s a big country but it must be brought down a peg. That is what this is about rather than the future of the Ukrainian people. They don’t care about people.

• Sanctions have been imposed on over half of the world’s countries, even if they are not as drastic as those that have been adopted against Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iran and Venezuela. The real reason behind the West’s current rage is that China is rapidly and confidently surging ahead of the United States.

• We can see through what the Americans want. Sitting somewhere overseas, they believe that they are beyond the reach, while leaving it to Europe to overcome the challenges they face in terms of encouraging and arming Ukraine to fight Russia, as well as footing the bill for the Middle East tragedy.

#Eurasia4You

• God gave us one continent, and we share it. This continent possesses immense and, in fact, the biggest natural resources, while several millennia-old civilisations inhabit it. Failing to benefit from these competitive advantages would be a mistake. This is what the idea of building a Greater Eurasian Partnership is all about, and the EAEU, SCO and ASEAN have already taken the first steps in this direction. We are establishing ties and promoting dialogue. If we succeed in fulfilling the plans we have, the Greater Eurasian Partnership will offer a solid foundation and serve as an economic and transport backbone for what President Vladimir Putin called a new Eurasian security architecture.

• There is a clear understanding that the Eurasian security architecture, just like the Greater Eurasian Partnership, must be open to all countries and continents, including Eurasia’s western part, even if so far the latter has been trying, as if by inertia, to ensure its interests within a Euro-Atlantic security concept instead of opting for the Eurasian framework, which would be natural and reasonable, considering the geography factor. This is their way of saying that they do not intend to do anything without the United States.

#BRICS

🌐 BRICS is about the new world order that is based on the main principle of the UN Charter – the sovereign equality of states.

• BRICS has no intention of dividing the world. It wants to bring together countries that desire closer relations so that they can live on the land they got from God and their ancestors just as they used to, as great civilisations.

#Africa

🌍 Decolonisation has taken place, in a broad sense. But being able to actually manage one’s freedom and resources is a different story. This is where neo-colonialism comes to the fore.

• The First Ministerial Conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum in Sochi, and the Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg in 2023 clearly put into perspective the trends that could be called Africa’s second awakening.

💬 President Vladimir #Putin: I would not want Russia to return to the trajectory it was on before 2022.

It involved covert interventions aimed at subordinating Russia to the interests of other nations that believed they had the right to do so.

☝️ Russia cannot exist in such a position.

#KievRegimeCrimes

Maxim Grigoryev, Сhairman of the International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, continues to document witness accounts and evidence of the war crimes perpetrated by the Kiev regime.

⚡️ Horrific account of neo-Nazi Azov Battalion's atrocities and cases of medieval-like tortures suffered and witnessed by one of the Russian POWs (call-sign 'Lutiy'):

💬 "[Ukrainian neo-Nazis] took me to the basement. 29 Russian soldiers spent two weeks there. All the time we sat with our hands and legs tied, blindfolded, naked on the concrete floor. It was very cold. <...>

There was one Russian soldier who told the captors that he was mobilised. The neo-Nazis from Azov battalion found out that he was in fact a volunteer. They came, started electrocuting him for 30 minutes. He was screaming. Then they cut his toes and fingers off. All of it was done gradually. He was screaming horribly. Then they pushed him out of the room and he never came back. He was murdered because they couldn't bring someone in such shape for POW exchange. <...>

The other one was beaten severely for two hours. Then they started cutting out shapes on his body. He was flayed on his right and left side. All of it was done meticulously so that he could feel everything. But he kept it together, never once screamed. They brought us to him to scare us of what was to come. They presumed he was dead. All of a sudden he came to his senses and they just bludgeoned him to death. <...>

They just tortured us for their own pleasure. <...> They beat me with sticks, batons. I was beaten on my knees. <...> My knees are severely damaged. I no longer have teeth. <...> They beat us three or four or five times a day, and after 10 pm six or seven drunken men would start beating everyone until 6 am <...>

They starved us, deprived us of sleep. Gave us bits of water. A Ukrainian nurse came and made our captors give us some scraps of food. <...> The next day she returned drunk, and watched us getting beat. She injected some of our soldiers with anesthetic and antishock medication so that we didn't pass out and could feel everything. <...>

Some started to hallucinate, imagining that they need to go to a convenience store to buy pastries, for example. They didn't realise any longer what was going on. A lot of our soldiers went mad. <...>

The Azov battalion ought to be completely destroyed."

👉 Find out more on the Kiev regime's war crimes, documented by Maxim Grigoryev

#Opinion

Excerpts from Professor Jeffrey Sachs's speech

📍Cambridge University, October 22, 2024

💬 We are not in any intrinsic war between the US and Russia. And Russia, by the way, despite every single thing that said every single day TRULY does not want more land. It's already 11 time zones. The last thing that they need or want is more land.

The war is about completely different things than everything you and I read about in our [Western] newspapers every day, because our newspapers are telling us stories that ultimately come back to narratives conceived in the US Defense Department and the CIA, and that are completely bogus.

***

The United States? We've never been at peace. All we do is war. And you know what the truth is? We learned it from here (the UK).

Because the British Empire was the most militarized society imaginable.

And unfortunately, the leaders of this country [the UK], and it turns out not to matter which party, because Starmer is as bad as Boris Johnson, all they know is military. It's unbelievable.

What's the first thing that Starmer does when he becomes prime minister? He goes to Kiev to pledge the endless support of the US, by the way, because Britain doesn't do anything. The endless support of the United States to the defeat of Russia. And then he flies across the Atlantic to try to convince Biden to authorize, and authorize means is for the US military to enable deep strikes inside Russia.

That's really a clever (NOT!) thing to do, especially because Putin said, well, then we'd be at war with each other and we'd be forced to reconsider our nuclear strategy. <...> He's not bluffing if Russia is fundamentally threatened.

***

👉 We [the US] provoked the war in Ukraine. We provoked the war in Ukraine, absolutely surely. And we'll do the same with Taiwan and we'll lose any war that happens, but maybe the world will end also over this stupidity and the people in Washington are stupid, I'm telling you. I know them.

📝🇷🇺Den 16 november hölls den tionde internationella utbildningskampanjen "Geografisk diktamen" vid Rysslands Handelsrepresention i Sverige.  Den anordnas årligen av Ryska geografiska sällskapet på initiativ av Ryska Federationens President Vladimir Putin.

Huvudsyftet med kampanjen är att popularisera geografiska kunskaper och öka intresset för Rysslands geografi. Över 50 personer deltog i diktamen, bland annat medlemmar i den ryska beskickningspersonalen i Sverige och deras familjemedlemmar. Deltagarna välkomnades av Rysslands Ambassadör i Sverige Sergey S. Belyaev.

🔗Läs mer:
https://is.gd/acmiRH

🏛 Today marks 79 years since the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded on November 16, 1945.

The history of our country’s cooperation with the Organisation began in 1954, when the USSR signed its Charter.

Today, the UNESCO List of World Cultural and Natural Heritage includes 33 Sites located in Russia. Among them is the astronomical observatories complex of the Kazan Federal University, which was included in the List last year. One of the practical results of fruitful cooperation with UNESCO is also the joint organisation of the UNESCO-Russia Mendeleev International Prize for Achievements in the Basic Sciences.

In recent years, the Organisation has been undergoing through an acute and fundamental crisis. The substitution of the principles of international law by the notorious ‘rule-based order,’ insistently pushed by the West, is having a devastating effect on UNESCO.

📰 An example of the blatant ‘double standard’ at UNESCO is the complete lack of response of the organisation’s management, and specifically Director-General Audrey Azoulay, to the murders, assassinations and persecution of Russian journalists by the Kiev regime, and the harassment and censorship of Russian media in the countries of the ‘collective West,’ despite the Executive Board instruction to ‘condemn the killings and physical violence against journalists without distinction’ is available to the Director General.

💬 Russian Foreign Ministry's Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: “The UNESCO Secretariat and Director-General Audrey Azoulay continue to openly disregard the Kiev regime’s crimes committed against Russian journalists, including premeditated murders, terrorist attacks and assassination attempts. The UNESCO Secretariat has openly disregarded the reliable data about the murder of Russian journalists. A glaring example of this assumption is the statistics cited in the report, according to which not a single Russian journalist was killed in 2022-2023.” (from the briefing of November 13, 2024)

Russia has consistently defended UNESCO's real values and priorities as a truly universal multilateral platform, something the Organisation’s Secretariat has long forgotten.

#UNESCO79 #RussiaUNRESCO

⚡ К предстоящему участию Министра иностранных дел России С.В.Лаврова в саммите «Группы двадцати»:

❗️Приоритет России – достижение в «Группе двадцати» конструктивных, учитывающих интересы всех стран-участниц договорённостей на основе консенсуса.

🔗 https://t.me/MID_Russia/48324

🎞️Edge of Peace
A documentary by RT.Doc

«Edge of Peace» explores the lives of civilians in the liberated territories of Donbass. It shares stories from Lugansk, Severodonetsk, Rubezhnoye, and other cities in the Lugansk People’s Republic.

The film features new citizens of Russia—militia fighters, priests, teachers, and children who have had to grow up too quickly. Their lives are filled with challenges and hardships, yet they remain ready to defend their homeland again and again—no matter what. The film also offers insights from prominent politicians and experts. They discuss the true historical journey of the liberated regions and explain why the Russian people living there have rejected foreign ideologies.

🔗Watch: https://en.rtdoc.tv/films/1356-edge-of-peace

⚡️ Comment by Russia's Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on the murder of Narodnaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Yulia Kuznetsova (November 18, 2024)

▪️On November 17, Narodnaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Yulia Kuznetsova died in the line of duty in the village of Bolshoye Soldatskoye, the Kursk Region, as a result of a targeted UAV attack launched by armed militants of the Kiev regime.

Ukrainian Nazis dropped drone-carried munitions on a vehicle loaded with the newspaper’s archives. The ensuing blast also injured an e-typesetting operator of the newspaper and an accompanying police officer.

We express our sincere condolences to Ms Kuznetsova’s family and friends. She died while performing her professional duty. We wish her wounded colleagues a rapid recovery and convalescence.

❗️ This cold-blooded murder is yet another example of the ugly and pathologically criminal nature of the Zelensky regime, which is ready to use bloody terrorist methods against civilians, civil services, and media personnel. Moreover, the Ukrainian Nazis have launched a real hunt for journalists covering frontline events. This year alone, they delivered targeted strikes that killed war correspondents Semyon Yeryomin, Valery Kozhin, and Nikita Tsitsagi, and heavily wounded Alexei Ivliyev and Yevgeny Poddubny.

🤐 This series of cruel murders and attempts on the lives of Russian journalists is a direct consequence of the connivance tactics adopted by the Western patrons of the Nazi clique in Kiev and the deliberate hushing-up of these crimes by the relevant international organisations and human rights groups.

Yet another eloquent example of this politically biased and profoundly immoral approach is the recently published draft report for 2022-2023 on media security and the impunity problem by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay, a report that ignores the official Russian data on journalist deaths during that period. <...>

Likewise, this hall of shame includes cynical statements by representatives of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). They claim that the lack of response to numerous crimes against Russian journalists from the High Commissioner and various special procedures under the UN Human Rights Council is due to Russia failing to provide access for them to confirm this data. <...>

☝️ Currently, Russia’s competent authorities are carrying out an investigation to identify and bring to account, as prescribed by law, all Ukrainian militants implicated in Yulia Kuznetsova’s murder, which is classified as a terrorist attack.

We emphasise once again: all those guilty of murdering the Russian journalist will face well-deserved and unavoidable punishment.

Read in full

❗️ Chairman of the Union of Journalists of Russia Vladimir Solovyov and the Head of the Moscow Branch of the Union of Journalists of Moscow Pavel Gusev sent a letter to the Director General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay in connection with the situation around her 2022-2023 draft report “Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity” (November 18, 2024)

✍️ The Russian Union of Journalists expresses its deep indignation regarding the situation surrounding your report on "Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity".

We are dismayed to note that the report lacks information about Russian journalists who were killed on duty over the past two years.

This fact raises serious questions about the objectivity and impartiality of the report's authors, especially in light of numerous accounts of attacks, threats, and the deaths of Russian journalists and media employees. Such situation gives the impression that UNESCO is deviating from its mission as an international organization dedicated to protect freedom of expression and the rights of all journalists, and de facto acting in accordance with the politicized agendas of certain anti-Russian states and blocs.

☝️ Disregarding the fates of Russian journalists, as well as ignoring crimes committed against them, not only undermines trust in the organization, but also contradicts its fundamental principles.

Russian Union of Journalists insists on a revision of the report's content to include objective data regarding our fallen colleagues, as well as information about Russian journalists who have faced violence, threats, and repression in a number of so-called "democratic" EU countries. Ignoring these facts is unacceptable and damages UNESCO's reputation as an independent and neutral arbiter on the protection of journalism and freedom of speech.

We hope for your attention to this matter, because respect for the profession of a journalist and his work should remain a fundamental principle of UNESCO's work.

📄 #G20 Rio de Janeiro Leaders’ Declaration

"We, the Leaders of the G20, met in Rio de Janeiro on 18-19 November 2024 to address major global challenges and crises and promote strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive growth."

Full text: t.me/MFARussia/22919

🎙 Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s response to a media question about alleged permission to Kiev to launch missile strikes deep into Russia

❓ Question: Western media are spreading reports that Joe Biden has allegedly given Kiev permission to launch strikes deep into Russian territory with American ATACMS missiles, and France and Great Britain to launch their SCALP and STORM SHADOW missiles. How could you comment on this?

💬 Maria Zakharova: It is yet unclear if these reports are based on official sources. One thing is clear: considering the Kiev regime’s defeats, its Western curators are betting on the maximum escalation of the hybrid war unleashed against Russia, trying to achieve an illusory goal: to inflict a strategic defeat on Moscow.

However, no wonder weapon that Zelensky and his henchmen pray to get is capable to affect the course of the special military operation.

President Vladimir Putin clearly stated on October 25 what “permitting” to use of NATO high-precision long-range weapons actually means. He stressed that Ukraine cannot execute such strikes on its own without using space satellites and flight assignments provided by NATO military personnel.

Kiev’s use of long-range missiles to attack our territory would mean a direct involvement of the United States and its satellites in military operations against Russia, as well as a radical change in the essence and nature of the conflict.

❗️ Russia’s response would then be adequate and significant.