Lavrov Says 50 Countries Want to See Russia Dismembered

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 1 – Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov says that Western countries have always wanted to weaken or even destroy Russia so that they will be able to “do whatever they want” in its place and elsewhere but that now they have assembled “a coalition of about 50 countries … to try to dismember Russia.”

            Lavrov made those remarks in a speech to his ministry’s chief training academy, the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO). He clearly intends them to inform the views and actions of future Russian ambassadors, and they certainly reflect the Kremlin’s increasingly anti-Western position (charter97.org/ru/news/2024/9/2/609185/).

            But for Lavrov to say this is remarkable. Few countries have ever expressed such a view despite the efforts of some non-Russian nationalists and regionalists to get them to do so. Indeed, the only recent example comes from Taiwan which has suggested that Beijing attack and occupy portions of Russia east of the Urals (trtrussian.com/novosti/tajvan-predlozhil-knr-zabrat-territorii-u-rossii-18202813).

            But the paranoia Lavrov manifests in making such a statement is noteworthy because of what it says about the thinking in the Kremlin concerning the fragility of the world’s last remaining empire, a fragility that has only been on ever more public view in the response of most Russians to the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk.