When French President Emmanuel Macron accused Russia of being behind Burkina Faso‘s choice to ask France’s army to depart the nation, he made it clear that Paris considers such interference in different nations’ affairs acceptable and pursues it, Russia’s international minister mentioned.
“This is a question of foreign policy principles. We do not interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs,” Sergey Lavrov mentioned Tuesday at a gathering along with his Eswatini counterpart Thuli Dladla within the capital Mbabane.
Lavrov recalled that a while in the past, the authorities of one other African nation, Mali, additionally determined to switch the French army with a Russian personal army firm.
He mentioned it occurred throughout a UN General Assembly session and he met on its sidelines with the then Foreign Minister of France, Jean-Yves Le Drian, in addition to with EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell, who “were somewhat aggressive” in asking him why Russia was working in Africa.
According to Lavrov, he mentioned Moscow was serious about growing relations with any nation prepared to work together with it, and to that, the European diplomats instructed him that “Russia should realize that Africa is a zone of special interest for the EU.”
“Making these neocolonialist statements, the Europeans considered it absolutely normal to work directly on the borders of the Russian Federation,” he famous.
Lavrov added that to his information, a number of personal French army corporations are working in Eurasia.
“This is considered normal, but when a sovereign African state is disappointed with its relations with France and would like to find new partners for resolving urgent problems (including security), they get a response like the one you mentioned from President Macron,” he confused.
Lavrov then mentioned that France supported terrorist teams in toppling Libyan chief Muammar Gaddafi, and when Libya “turned into a black hole” and its neighbors, together with Mali, began affected by an influx of each terrorists and weapons, France requested the UN Security Council to help sending a French pressure to Mali as a part of Operation Barkhane.
The minister mentioned the French authorities additionally requested the council to grant them a further mandate for countering the exact same terrorists they’d supported in Libya, “thereby creating a spiral of terrorist violence that continues in Africa to this day.”
“At the time, we supported the French in the UN Security Council because we believed in the need to counter terrorism. But we are not to blame for the fact that the French military in Mali have not lived up to the expectations of this country’s leadership,” he confused.
Lavrov mentioned he’s saddened that almost all European international coverage initiatives “remain imbued with a neo-colonial mentality, a neo-colonial logic based on the divide et impera-divide and rule-principle.”
“We stand for having all countries in the West and East work together to come up with constructive solutions to the issues of the Global South, primarily in Africa, instead of using these countries as an avenue for promoting their unilateral confrontational approaches,” he added.
