By Christopher Scicluna
VALLETTA (Reuters) -Western countries including the United States assailed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the war in Ukraine on Thursday at an annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Malta.
Ukraine dominated the foreign ministers’ meeting politically although envoys were also due to formally approve agreements on issues including senior staff positions at the security and rights body, where Western powers often accuse Russia of flouting human rights and other international norms.
“My message to the Russian delegation is the following: We are not taken in by your lies. We know what you’re doing. You’re trying to rebuild the Russian empire and we will not let you. We will resist you every inch of the way,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a speech.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told the meeting that his country was continuing to fight for its right to exist.
“And the Russian war criminal at this table must know: Ukraine will win this right and justice will prevail,” he said.
Sikorksi, Sybiha and others left the room for Lavrov’s speech, as often happens at international meetings, and Lavrov was absent when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered his speech.
This was Lavrov’s first visit to a European Union member state since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Moscow has often blamed the West for the war.
“I regret that our colleague Mr. Lavrov has left the room, not giving the courtesy to listen to us as we listened to his. And of course, our Russian colleague is very adept at drowning listeners in a tsunami of misinformation,” Blinken said in his speech to the meeting.
Lavrov and Blinken were not scheduled to meet.
The OSCE gathering of foreign ministers and other officials from 57 participating states in North America, Europe and Central Asia is overshadowed by the imminent return to the White House of Donald Trump, whose advisers are floating proposals to end the war that would cede large parts of Ukraine to Russia.
‘HOT’ WAR
With Trump due to take office next month, Western powers reiterated their support for Ukraine and Russia renewed its criticism of the OSCE, which Lavrov said last year was “essentially being turned into an appendage of NATO and the European Union”.
In his speech, Lavrov likened the current situation to the Cold War, saying there was a greater risk of it becoming “hot”.
“We do not want to attack anyone. The United States … are waging war against us by using the Ukrainian neo-Nazi forces. They supply them with weapons, they help them to use long-range weapons against our territory,” Lavrov told a news conference afterwards. Western states and Ukraine reject the Nazi analogy.
The OSCE is the successor to a body set up during the Cold War for the east and west to engage with each other. In recent years, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine, Moscow has used what is in effect a veto each country has to block decisions.
This year, Armenia and Azerbaijan are blocking the OSCE budget, diplomats say, over issues related to their conflict in the mountainous territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Diplomats say a deal was reached this week to fill four senior OSCE positions including that of secretary general, which will be taken up by Turkey’s Feridun Sinirlioglu, who was foreign minister in a caretaker government in 2015.
The most important annual decision – which country will next hold the OSCE’s annually rotating chairmanship – has long been settled. Finland will hold it for the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act that lay the foundation for the current OSCE.
(Additional reporting by Yuliia Dysa, Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw and Humeyra Pamuk in Brussels; Writing by Francois Murphy; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Timothy Heritage and Jonathan Oatis)
