MOSCOW, June 17. /TASS/. Russia is observing an intention of some states to politicize the issue of transnational threats and challenges instead of addressing them jointly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday as a press conference following a special Russia-ASEAN meeting held via video conference.
Lavrov informed that the meeting participants "agreed to speed up drafting of an integrated strategic document for developing Russia-ASEAN dialogue in the next 5 years" as well as accelerate the update of working plans of Russia and the association’s to launch new areas of cooperation to fight terrorism and advance education.
"There are interesting proposals to start new areas of cooperation, including finances. It was decided to pay special attention to continuing cooperation in ensuring security of information and communication technologies. Transnational threats and challenges, of course, demand collective responses and measures as well as coming up with integrated multilateral approaches. However, and we talked about this today, we often witness here some states demonstrating an opposite approach to politicize the problem and act as every man for himself instead of joining efforts," Lavrov stressed.
"We are concerned by the attempts of some countries to abuse the coronavirus infection developments to achieve selfish geopolitical goals or to settle accounts with dissenting governments," the minister added.
According to him, all countries at the meeting "unanimously expressed solidarity with the coordinating role of the United Nations and the World Health Organization to counter the pandemic and unanimously backed the approaches set out by the UN Secretary-General [who noted that] unilateral actions limiting supplies of medicine, equipment and food to some countries are unacceptable.".