Marking Russia’s Diplomatic Worker’s Day

On Feb 10, Russia observes a professional holiday—Diplomatic Worker’s Day. This date in 1549 marks the earliest documented mention of the Posolsky Prikaz (Ambassadorial Office) which became the prototype of the modern Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Russia due to its unique geographical location has always had a proactive foreign policy often being at the center of major political processes both in Europe and Asia.

Suffice it to mention that it was the Soviet Union that defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and paid the ultimate price for the Victory – over 30 million of Soviet citizens killed in battles with Nazi Germans across the USSR, during liberation operations in Eastern Europe and in Germany itself. No country in the world could ever pretend it contributed as much to the Nazis’ defeat. 

Today just like a century ago Russia is fighting Nazism often referred to as “the brown plague”, only this time—in the neighboring Ukraine. After the coup d’état instigated in Kiev by the West in 2014, the new Ukrainian authorities under the guidance of their Western sponsors started, against its own Constitution, to ban the Russian language, spoken by the population of the Eastern part of the-then Ukraine as mother tongue.

They denied their children education in Russian and in the end launched a military campaign against their own citizens who did not accept the neo-Nazi policies of Zelensky regime.  After eight years of daily shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces of civilians in the Donbass region and negotiations clearly undermined by the Ukrainian side, Russia was left with no choice but to force the Kiev regime to stop terrorizing the population of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions – recognizing their independence, accepting their petition to join the Russian Federation and commencing the special military operation aimed at defending the population of Donbass, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine as well as ensuring Russia’s security.

The collective West, of course, did not like that move as it aspired to make the territory of Ukraine a platform for possible future operations against Russia de facto bringing the world to the brink of a III World War. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, even today we are facing “a total hybrid war”.

“The collective West has prepared for a new crusade in the East. This time, it is using Ukrainian neo-Nazis, the successors of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich, as their advance party. The collective West, namely Americans, the EU and NATO (that the US has completely subdued) are no longer concealing their goals. They want not only to defeat us strategically on the battlefield but also to wreck the Russian economy, and weaken or even destroy Russia’s centuries-long statehood. These are not figures of speech but the goals set by Western strategists. They are talking about them on the record”.

Let us be clear on this topic. History shows that the West sees the world as its backyard where it goes for natural and human resources. First, it was the colonization of peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Then, after these countries gained independence (often with the help of the Soviet Union), the collective West in order to control their ex-colonies created the Bretton-Woods system that benefits only the developed countries who impose their policies on the developing nations who want to receive funding from international financial institutions. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western countries did not even care about the international law and violated it by waging wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq. 

That is to say, Russia being the biggest country of the world, rich in natural resources, able to conduct its own foreign policy has always been perceived by the West as a threat to their dominance.

In our view, this is one of the main reasons why the US, the EU and their allies do everything in their power to try to weaken Russia by creating chaos on its borders, nurturing the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, supplying it with arms and putting an unimaginable amount of pressure on developing countries around the world to make them support the criminal Kiev regime that was exterminating its own citizens from 2014 until 2022 in Donbass. 

Fortunately, a lot of our foreign partners realize all of this and stick to their own vision of the processes taking place around the world. As President Putin put it, Russia managed not only to thwart the plans of the collective West to isolate the country, but also to step up cooperation with the majority of members of the international community in Eurasia, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin America. 

As before, Russia considers its absolute priorities to be protecting the lawful rights of Russian citizens and supporting compatriots abroad, waging an uncompromising struggle against neo-Nazism and ethnic discrimination in all its forms. As for Russian diplomacy, it will continue supporting the trend towards the formation of a multipolar, truly democratic world order based on equality of states (regardless of their size and form of rule), mutual respect and observance of the generally recognized norms of international law.

The author is Minister Counsellor, DCM, Embassy of Russia in Nepal