ASTANA, November 7. /TASS/. Moscow appreciates efforts on the part of the global majority to endorse just agreements toward removing the fundamental reasons behind the Ukraine crisis, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference following his working visit to Kazakhstan.
"On September 27, Kazakhstan attended a meeting of the Friends of Peace group on Ukraine, convened by China and Brazil, and we hailed the very joining of efforts by countries in the Global South, the Global East and the global majority to promote fair agreements that will make it possible to eliminate the root cause of the Ukraine crisis and ensure peace there. I’d like to stress - and we have discussed it today - that, in February 2023, Chinese leader Xi Jinping presented his initiative on global security," Lavrov stated.
Xi’s plan actually "was not devoted to resolving a specific crisis, but included those general principles that should be used to resolve any conflicts anywhere in the world," Russia’s top diplomat explained. "Among other key principles, that Chinese initiative called for understanding and eliminating the root causes of a particular crisis," he emphasized, without which, he argued, restoring stability and security would be difficult.
These root causes, Lavrov said, include NATO’s reckless expansion eastward and the consistent extermination by the Kiev regime of all things Russian - the language, the education the culture and the media, as he recounted that a law banning the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church was recently signed in Ukraine.
"Our partners understand only too well what the root cause of the [Ukraine] problem is, and we will continue our dialogue," the Russian foreign minister said. "We welcome Kazakhstan’s role in building such a major coalition toward creating conditions for address the issues I have mentioned," he concluded.