Russian FM Lavrov Slams the West’s 'Continuous Lies' on NATO’s Eastward Strides in Delhi Speech

When you take a look at the list of partners of India’s flagship diplomatic and geopolitical conference the Raisina Dialogue, besides the Indian government which coordinates the event, you would see many Western players – from the UK government, to German state-funded NGOs, to large multinational corporations. In today’s world, this would usually mean that the event may have a lot of anti-Russian rhetoric in the main program, and on the sidelines.

But in the case of the Raisina Dialogue, the organizers appear to have been seriously focused on presenting all points of view in the discussion regarding the causes of the conflict between Moscow and the West in Ukraine.

According to Raisina Dialogue delegate Nikhil Gadia, who is a Strategic Partner at the legal firm Bansal Chandra & Associates, one of the reasons for India's respect towards Moscow's position is a historic one:

“I think India and Russia have had deep relations since the USSR time. We were always told that Russia is always our friend.”

The Russian foreign minister's speech at the New Delhi conference made it into the headlines on Friday, with Sergey Lavrov giving the audience a 30-minute crash course on international politics – with topics ranging from regional security and Asian geopolitics to NATO expansion, to the conflicts in Kosovo and Ukraine, to energy security, and last year’s Nord Stream gas pipeline sabotage.

Lavrov, whose diplomatic career began in the 1970s at the Soviet Embassy in Sri Lanka and continued as part of the Soviet mission to the UN later on, has been Moscow’s top diplomat for the past 19 years. In fluent English, he shared with the New Delhi audience his concerns about the West’s attempts to expand NATO eastwards, despite previous promises not to do so.

“Yesterday the French ambassador to Israel who was personally participating in discussions between Western leaders and [First President of the USSR Mikhail] Gorbachev, that there was a commitment not to expand NATO,” Lavrov said. “And then he added that 'it does not mean that Russia is right in what it is doing in Ukraine.' But between the lie about not expanding NATO and the events which started one year ago, there were so many developments, which you cannot overlook. The lies continued, including the lies not about some oral promises, but about some commitments on paper.”

Moscow’s top diplomat explained that the West’s written promises to Russia, given at the OSCE summit in Istanbul in 1999, were later broken, with “indivisible security” mentioned in the summit’s documents being ignored by the West.

Raisina Dialogue delegate Harsh Suri, who is co-founder of the New Delhi-based think tank Geostrata, told Sputnik on the sidelines of the conference that Lavrov “has really proved that Russia is the one who suffered,” adding further evidence of NATO’s expansion, greenlighted by the participants of the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit, where the alliance made a decision to invite Croatia and Albania, just four years after the 2004 expansion, when the Eastern European countries of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia became members of the bloc:

“It is NATO which has expanded, and NATO has crossed the limits. Since [the] Bucharest [NATO] Summit we have seen that [it] is going out of its limits,“ said Suri.

Besides his appearance at the Raisina Dialogue, Lavrov’s three-day working visit to India included participation in the G20 Foreign Ministers' Meeting, which was overshadowed by sharp divisions over Ukraine between G7 nations within the G20 and the rest of the organization.

This week, Russia’s top diplomat also met with his Indian colleague Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and with the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Sergey Lavrov had a big bilateral schedule in New Delhi, meeting with diplomats from Brazil, Turkiye, China, and Armenia. On the sidelines of his official program, he took part on Wednesday in the opening ceremony of an exhibit dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy at the New Delhi Book Fair.