MOSCOW, August 28. /TASS/. Russian-Indian strategic partnership has good perspectives, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Zvezda television channel, which was posted on the foreign ministry’s website on Sunday.
"I am convinced that our strategic partnership has good perspectives," he said, adding that relations between the two countries have been at the highest level since India gained its independence.
"These relations were characterized as strategic partnership. Then, after a certain period of the development of cooperation, our Indian friends suggested they be called privileged strategic partnership. Some time later, they were described as special privileged strategic partnership at New Delhi’s initiative. We don’t have such a quality of relations, committed to paper in official documents adopted at the top level, with any other country of the world," he said in the interview for a documentary about the Nonaligned Movement.
"We saw for ourselves that these are really especially privileged relations during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India in December 2021. I saw it once again when I visited India not long ago. I was received by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had meaningful talks with my counterpart, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar," Lavrov noted.
He stressed that India was among the founders of the Nonaligned Movement and is still among the leaders of this movement. "This leadership is manifested in the foreign policy initiatives India advances on the international arena. I mean the concept of multipolarity, which means that the world cannot develop under Western patterns any longer as it has been developing for nearly half a millennium," he said that this multipolarity is becoming an objective fact.
According to the Russian top diplomat, India, Russia and a number of Nonaligned countries are now centers of economic growth and political influence, which are be become the pillars of the new world order. "The more such reliable, large and responsible pillars we have, the more stable the world order will be. We want this world order to be democratic and fair, as envisaged in the United Nations Charter’s principle of sovereign equality of states. The West has been hampering the implementation of this principle, trying to slow down the objective historic process and preserve its dominance in international affairs," he said.