MOSCOW, July 12. /TASS/. The equal and mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and African countries developing amid the transition from a monopolar to a multipolar world is reaching a qualitatively new level, Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Oleg Ozerov, who is also the head of the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, said on Wednesday.

"It is absolutely clear that our cooperation with Africa is moving to a qualitatively new level," he said at a roundtable discussion on media cooperation between Russia and Africa. "Some may say that we are returning to the era of African countries fighting for independence, when there were very broad ties between the Soviet Union and African nations, but some may argue that this is a fundamentally new level of cooperation, since we are not talking about Russia helping to establish the independence and statehood of African countries, which was typical in the first period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but about an absolutely different relationship that is being shaped."

According to the diplomat, firstly, "we are talking about the development of equal, mutually beneficial relations between Russia and African countries." Secondly, the ambassador continued, this "is taking place at a watershed in the development of the entire system of international relations, or rather, its transformation and transition from a monopolar to a multipolar world - to a system without any diktat of one power, one party, one bloc of countries, but when the principle of sovereign equality will be implemented, on which the United Nations Charter is actually based."

"Regrettably, we see that these principles have been frequently violated, and now we are talking about in some sense returning to the origins and transforming the system of recent decades into a more equitable one that will meet the national interests of both Russia and other countries," Ozerov concluded. "Specifically, we are talking about African nations now."