UNITED NATIONS (AP) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday laid the blame for a “bleeding Middle East and North Africa” on the U.S. and its allies, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly smacking of the kind of rhetoric that reflected the state of superpower relations during the Cold War.
In wide-ranging comments, Lavrov depicted Moscow’s military involvement in Syria as crucial to efforts to prevent the crisis from spiraling even more out of control. He accused Ukraine of playing “zero-point games” instead of hewing to agreements meant to reduce the confrontation with his country. He criticized the doping bans on Russian athletes as politically motivated and reproached the West for allegedly stalling on nuclear arms reduction commitments and conventional disarmament.
Suggesting that the West was gripped by attempts to impose its own vision of a world order, Lavrov invoked George Orwell and his anti-utopian “Animal Farm” novel “where all animals are equal, but some are more equal.” He accused the West of promoting their own interests to the detriment of others, through “mentoring, supremacy (and) exclusiveness.”
Their “arrogant attitude and feeling of their infallibility in pushing forward unilateral hazardous solutions to the most complex conflicts and crises can be observed by the example of bleeding Middle East and North Africa,” he said. “As a result, the basis of world stability is being destroyed.”
Lavrov’s comments reflected the latest spike in tensions between Moscow and Washington, with both sides blaming each other for the collapse of the latest efforts to find a peace formula for Syria.