OSCE foreign ministers met in Skopje, North Macedonia, for a summit. Credit: Embassy of Switzerland in North Macedonia, via Facebook.
Skopje, Dec 1 (CTK) – Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky was among the participants who walked out of the room during Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at a meeting of foreign ministers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) yesterday in Skopje, North Macedonia.
In his speech, Lavrov accused the West of waging a hybrid war against Russia and said Moldova could be its next victim. Cited by the Reuters agency, he described the EU as an aggressive geopolitical project.
“An officer in charge of disinformation listened to the Russian foreign minister’s speech on behalf of the Czech delegation,” the Czech Foreign Ministry said.
According to the TASS news agency, Lavrov said in his speech that the USA and its European satellites, in an attempt to bring down the Russian economy, had imposed thousands of sanctions on Russia, putting an end to the broad practical cooperation between East and West in their once common region.
Lavrov said Moldova was doomed to become another victim of the hybrid war against Russia, which he said the West had unleashed. The OSCE itself is in a deplorable state and its prospects remain unclear, he said.
Russia invaded Ukraine last February, and has seen the West adopt a series of anti-Russian sanctions in response.
In their speeches today, the ministers mostly harshly criticised Russia, arguing that Moscow had violated the principles on which the OSCE is based by waging an aggressive war against a neighbour. As expected, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, who also held bilateral talks with Lavrov, took a different approach. He argued that the only solution to the conflict is peace talks, and supplying arms to Ukraine only delays this.
