Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in China on Wednesday for a meeting ostensibly focused on Afghanistan, but touted by Russian media as a landmark in the new axis of global power formed by the two authoritarian nations.
Lavrov is officially in China to attend the Third Meeting of Foreign Ministers of Afghanistan’s Neighboring Countries, which begins on Thursday. Other attendees include Tajikistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Russia’s state-controlled RT.com on Wednesday played up the meeting between Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as the main event of Lavrov’s trip.
“Unlike most Western nations, and some Asian countries, Beijing has refused to condemn Moscow and rejected calls to impose sanctions,” RT.com sniffed.
This screengrab taken on March 30, 2022 from video by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) via AFPTV shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) meeting his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during his first visit to China since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in February, at their meeting in Huangshan in China’s Anhui province. – Moscow’s top diplomat landed in the eastern city of Huangshan early on March 30 for a series of meetings about the future of Afghanistan. (STR/CCTV/AFP via Getty Images)
Lavrov borrowed a page from Chinese propaganda by denouncing the U.S. and Europe for cynically and hypocritically using first Afghanistan, and then Ukraine, as pawns to enforce Western ideals of human rights and democracy:
Lavrov and Wang both said their meeting would help Russia and China create a new, “fair” world order to replace the waning American Century and fading post-WWII European alliance, according to RT:
The neighboring countries will work to achieve “a multipolar, fair, and democratic world order,” Lavrov said after arriving in Tunxi, a city in China’s eastern inland Anhui Province, on Wednesday. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova posted a photo of the two ministers greeting each other with an elbow bump.
Beijing has argued that economic restrictions disrupt world trade and will not resolve the conflict. Officials insist only dialogue and diplomacy can lead to peace.
TASS quoted Wang as saying that despite “new challenges” to the ties between the two nations, “the will of both sides to develop bilateral relations has become even stronger.” The minister said this month that China’s relations with Russia is “one of the most crucial bilateral relationships in the world,” and hailed the friendship between the pair as “ironclad.”
RT.com slipped a little by referring to the invasion of Ukraine as an “attack” – the regime of dictator Vladimir Putin requires Russians to refer to the conflict as a “special military operation,” never an attack, war, or invasion – but dutifully justified it as Russia’s understandable reaction to “a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements.”
The Minsk Accords were a “roadmap” for peacefully resolving the conflict between Ukraine, Russia, and Russia-backed insurgents in the eastern Donbas region. All three parties were accused of violating the accords in various ways.
The Moscow Times on Wednesday quoted Lavrov being even more explicit about the new world order, and seemingly accepting Russia’s position as China’s junior partner in the endeavor:
U.S. officials have accused China of signaling “willingness” to provide military and economic aid to Russia, while President Joe Biden has compared the invasion of Ukraine to China’s crushing of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
But on Wednesday, Lavrov painted a picture of a new world order, saying the world was “living through a very serious stage in the history of international relations.”
“We, together with you, and with our sympathizers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said in a video released by the Russian Foreign Ministry ahead of a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
The Moscow Times noted that Chinese state media has been curiously quiet about the Wang-Lavrov meeting at press time, beyond publishing a few recycled quotes from Chinese officials about how “China-Russia cooperation has no limits.”
Deutsche Welle (DW) saw China and Russia bonding over their opposition to Western sanctions, with Wang offering China’s opposition to the massive sanctions imposed on Russia after its attack on Ukraine, and over Afghanistan, which could become something of a pilot project for the alleged order created by Beijing and Moscow. Last week, Wang paid his first visit to Kabul since the Taliban stormed Afghanistan and seized power in August.
China also has lucrative mining interests in Afghanistan, while Russia has a motherlode of bad memories after its brutal and frustrating occupation of the country in the 1980s.
CBS News suggested on Sunday that Russia might hope to banish the ghosts of the Eighties and restore some lost national pride by teaming up with China to exert influence over Afghanistan, potentially developing a political narrative that the new China-Russia world order was able to succeed where the United States disastrously failed.
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