MOSCOW, October 31. /TASS/. The collective West uses the dirtiest geopolitical engineering tricks against Moscow and Beijing in a bid to maintain its hegemony, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a video address to participants in an international conference dubbed "The Role of Public Diplomacy in the Establishment, Recovery and Development of Russia-China Relations", dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Russia-China Friendship Association.

"Today, the collective West is frantically trying to maintain its hegemony, using utterly unscrupulous methods of geopolitical engineering against Russia and China, whom it has picked as its main adversaries," the Russian top diplomat noted.

According to him, given this situation, Moscow and Beijing maintain close foreign policy coordination. "Ties between Moscow and Beijing are one of the key factors in terms of efforts to democratize international relations and establish a more just multipolar world order," Lavrov emphasized.

The Russian foreign minister also pointed out that firm support for those efforts from the general public remained an important tool for improving the large-scale system of bilateral cooperation. "The activities of our politicians and diplomats would have been less effective without the support of public diplomacy. Its contribution to the promotion of the unbiased image of our countries and the popularization of each other’s best achievements in the fields of science, culture and art is relevant and weighty," Lavrov stressed.