Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s answer to a question from TASS news agency on the interview by the Ambassador of France to Russia Pierre Levy with the Russian media
Question: The Russian media have recently published an interview with Ambassador of France to Russia Pierre Levy. In it, he shared his assessment of the current international situation and the relations between Russia and France, just before completing his mission here and leaving our country. In particular, his Excellency the Ambassador said that a multipolar world order existed well before February 2022. He went on to suggest that his country suggested ways of improving the system of international relations and enhancing collective efforts in the interests of peace and security. He also talked about France as being on the frontlines of efforts to settle the Ukraine crisis. How would you comment on the French diplomat’s statements?
Maria Zakharova: We read his interview. My first point is that the Ambassador was wide of the mark when he said that Paris suggested undertaking collective action in the interests of peace and security. How strange to hear this from someone representing a country which is part of a military bloc, which, in turn, has been pursuing an eastward geopolitical expansion policy for many years now. Moreover, it has been acting this way despite the assurances it gave to the Soviet leaders not to move in the eastern direction by an inch. This also includes the commitments it assumed at the highest level, including within the OSCE to abide by the principle of equal and indivisible security, while refraining from reinforcing one’s own security at the expense of others. Today, NATO countries, including France, are waging a total hybrid war against Russia, teetering on the brink of an outright armed clash with us.
Any reasonable person will wonder whether NATO ever did anything to promote peace. This was not the case during NATO’s aggression in Europe against Yugoslavia – this much is clear. The bombing of Libya and the destruction of Libyan statehood deserve a special mention, since Paris played quite an important, and also unsavoury, role in these efforts.
Now let me turn to the Ambassador’s claims that a multipolar world order pre-existed 2022, as well as the way he talked about Paris allegedly doing something to perfect the system of international relations. If we assume that France did promote a certain vision or an agenda throughout this period, it had nothing to do with multi-polarity. Instead, it focused on the Western-centric concept of multilateralism, which basically amounts to an iteration of a unipolar vision. If the past years are any guide, multilateralism in this version consists of preserving the so-called rules-based order at any costs, including by spilling a lot of blood, instead of promoting equal and mutually beneficial interstate dialogue. It is Washington which de facto sets these rules, alongside several European capitals. They seek to impose these rules on the rest of the international community as a given and a fundamental truth for cementing the West’s global hegemony.
This vision of the world order implies that all other countries must strictly abide by the instructions they receive from the collective West without any objections or hesitation. Those who try to challenge these orders face various kinds of pressure. In particular, they can be subjected to various coercive economic measures, including unilateral sanctions. The West also relies on its information and propaganda capabilities by demonising entire countries and their peoples, casting them as enemies and blaming them for all the possible sins, including authoritarianism, nationalism, or revanchist aspirations. “Those who oppose us are against us” – this is the gist of the world order the West wants to build. This vision clearly falls short of multi-polarity.
Today, the world is moving toward a genuinely multipolar order. This is an objective process. It used to be that a single country or a group of countries dominated the world, but this system is about to be replaced by an order based on a balance of power and interests of the key decision-making centres around the world. The sovereign equality of states, cooperation based on a balance of interests and mutual benefit, as well as non-interference in domestic affairs, cultural and civilisational diversity, the rule of international law in governing interstate relations based on the provisions of the UN Charter considering their holistic and interconnected nature – these are the main tenets of a polycentric, or multipolar, world order.
The countries of the Global South and East, the global majority, share our viewpoint. As we see, the countries in Eurasia, the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America are striving to strengthen their sovereignty and independence. They are guided by national interests when determining domestic and foreign policy priorities. They stand for building equal relations between the states. They demand, fairly, that the entire humanity rather than a small group of “chosen” countries in the West can manage the resources of this planet. And yet, they are not copying Western ultraliberal models and instead developing on the foundation of their own customs, roots and values.
As for the role of Paris in settling the Ukraine conflict, we have commented on this multiple times. If we look at the original cause of the conflict and its timeline, France's role has been anything but that of an intermediary. In 2014, Paris actively supported the anti-constitutional nationalist coup in Ukraine. The then Foreign Minister of France Laurent Fabius put his signature under the agreement between the “leaders of the Maidan” and incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych. Apparently, he knew that he was participating in the collective deceit of a legitimate head of state. In the subsequent years, Paris condoned the criminal Kiev regime, turning away from its blatant sabotage of the Minsk agreements and the war crimes of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Donbass against the citizens of their own country. In December 2022, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a similar confession, the former President of France Francois Hollande, who had been also involved in the Minsk talks in 2015, admitted that, instead of fulfilling the Minsk agreements, Paris and Berlin had had a goal to give Ukraine time to recover and strengthen its military potential for a revanche.
We have to state that, with the connivance of France and Germany, Ukraine lost an opportunity to settle the crisis in Donbass on the basis of the Minsk agreements, by re-integrating the eastern regions, and instead made a bid for resolving the conflict by force. Under London’s pressure and with the connivance of its Western curators, including France, Kiev exited the talks with Russia and later formalised a legal ban on any talks whatsoever. This decision cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers’ lives, a destroyed economy and suffering of the civilian population.
Today, France is among the most active financial and military sponsors of the Kiev regime, seeking to deliver a “strategic defeat” to Russia, consistently raise stakes in the Ukrainian conflict, gradually create escalation and promote the ideas of a Western military intervention in Ukraine, which scales up risks of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.
It is indicative that in his interview, the French Ambassador spoke about the importance of resuming compliance with international law and the UN Charter, and about considering that “Ukrainians, Europeans and France are concerned about security.” He said nothing though about the rampant neo-Nazism in Ukraine, repressive actions against the opposition, infringement upon believers’ rights and mass violations of the rights of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens. As we can see, there is no room for Russia, its legitimate national interests and the interests of a significant part of the Ukrainians themselves in Paris’s mediation formula.
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