Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, has accused the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) of being unjust and partisan in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, saying the agency has adopted the unfair sanctions slapped on Moscow by the West.
He made the remarks on Tuesday at the general meeting of the Commission of the Russian Federation for UNESCO.
Russia launched a Special Military Operation in Ukraine in February this year to demilitarize Ukraine so that there would be no weapons posing a threat to Russia, protect the people of Donetsk and Lugansk Republics and to denazify Ukraine.
But since then, various western countries and organizations thrown unfounded blames against Russia with an intention of mislead the World and deprive it from understanding the real cause of this conflict.
Although many countries and international organizations have refused to fall victim of this propaganda, various others including the UNESCO, according to Lavrov.
He says Russia is “seriously concerned over the position taken by the UNESCO Secretariat that began to obediently follow all Western instructions in violation of the principle of impartiality and, therefore, the UNESCO Charter.”
Below is his full speech;
Colleagues,
We are holding our regular general meeting of the Commission for UNESCO. The year under review has been and remains difficult, including for international cooperation in the UNESCO areas – education, science, culture, sports and communications.
The collective West has launched an unprecedented information and propaganda campaign as part of its hybrid war against our country. Unfriendly countries were pushing a confrontation agenda in UNESCO against all principles underlying this organisation.
UNESCO’s programme activities and related convention mechanisms were politicised and artificially oriented to serving the opportunistic interests of the Kiev regime. Russophobia reached its peak when the UNESCO Executive Board rejected our proposal to declare June 6 (Alexander Pushkin’s birthday) World Day of the Russian Language.
This move refuted the claims that the West was not campaigning for the cancellation of all things Russian in response to the crisis in Ukraine and proved the opposite.
We are seriously concerned over the position taken by the UNESCO Secretariat that began to obediently follow all Western instructions in violation of the principle of impartiality and, therefore, the UNESCO Charter. During this year, UNESCO did not sponsor any undertaking in Russia.
All Russian applications for new chairs were rejected. The Secretariat deliberately impeded Russia-supported scientific projects and blocked targeted volunteer contributions, thereby directly harming the interests of the developing nations to whom these contributions mattered.
The hypocrisy culminated in UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay refusing to denounce the vicious murder of our journalist Darya Dugina by radical Ukrainian nationalists. She did this in defiance of the Secretariat’s authority and practice as regards similar tragic incidents in the past.
It would be wrong to say that this position of the Secretariat took shape only this year, in the course of the special military operation. For many years, the Director-General and her staff did not react in any way to the years-long infringements on the Russian language in Ukraine and the Baltics and the shameful practice of demolishing monuments to the defeaters of Nazism in the EU countries.