MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that Russia intends to continue coordination with friendly governments to confront what it describes as Western blackmail and coercion, describing Moscow’s confrontation with the United States and Europe as a defense of international law, not a challenge to it.
In a welcoming speech to the 69th annual meeting of the Russian International Law Society, Lavrov accused what he called the “collective West” of violating the UN Charter through actions he said ranged from unilateral sanctions to the direct use of armed force. He said that Russia, along with what he called the “global majority,” would continue to make efforts to overcome these patterns.
These statements, which were reported by the official RIA Novosti news agency, did not open new horizons. However, they distill the argument that has anchored Russian foreign policy since the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022: that a retreating West is bucking the rules of the postwar order to maintain its hegemony, and that Moscow is talking about a broad coalition of countries seeking a more balanced world.
Lavrov framed the dispute as a struggle over the meaning of the Charter itself. I have He argued over and over again That principles such as sovereign equality and non-interference were written in the document but ignored by Western capitals, is a charge that has been pushed in places from the UN General Assembly to forums alongside Chinese partners and others. Russian officials use the phrase “like-minded countries” to refer to a group they say includes China, India, Brazil and members of the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Western governments reject this narrative. The United States and the European Union maintain that their sanctions are a legal response to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an act that was condemned by much of the international community as a violation of the Charter that Lavrov cites. A General Assembly resolution adopted after the invasion required Russia to withdraw its forces, and a subsequent measure supported a mechanism to register claims for war damage.
The timing reflects a moment of sustained pressure on Moscow. Sanctions imposed under President Joseph Biden remain in place, and the Trump administration has since added measures targeting Russian energy companies Lukoil and Rosneft, according to Lavrov’s recent interviews. The same administration has exerted its influence elsewhere, including the Middle East, where it has sought to broker talks with Iran. Efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, including proposals put forward after the 2024 summit in Alaska, have yielded no settlement, with each side blaming the other.
For its part, Russia has moved strongly towards partnerships outside the West. President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping signed a joint declaration on a multipolar world during Putin’s visit to Beijing in May, and Lavrov pointed to the increasing use of the ruble and yuan in bilateral trade as evidence that the Western-led financial system is loosening its grip. These themes recur in almost every keynote he gives.
The economic background complicates the message. Russia’s wartime economy has proven more resilient than many Western forecasters had expected, boosted by energy sales to Asia and big government spending, but carrying pressures from high inflation and labor shortages. Lavrov rarely talks about these costs publicly, preferring to present the confrontation with the West as a test of endurance that Russia and its partners can win.
Monday’s audience was a local legal body, and the speech was a defense of Russia’s reading of international law to a crowd of professionals. Lavrov said Moscow and its partners remain committed to strengthening legal principles in global affairs, a formula that allows Russia to appear as a guardian of the Charter even when Western jurists accuse it of the opposite.
Specialists who follow Russian messaging note that the language is aimed at several audiences at once. For the Global South, it offers a critique of sanctions and what Moscow calls neocolonialism. For listeners at home, it depicts a costly war and a strained economy as principled resistance. For the West, this indicates that Russia does not intend to soften its position in any talks.
Whether the rhetoric changes anything on the ground is another question. The war in Ukraine is still ongoing, communications between Moscow and Washington remain weak, and the sanctions architecture that has been built up since 2022 shows no sign of abating. Lavrov’s resort to the Charter is unlikely to change calculations in Western capitals, where officials read the same text as a basis for condemning Russia’s behavior.
For now, the message from Moscow is continuity. Lavrov said that Russia will continue to work with countries that share its view on the disputed regime, expressing confidence that the balance of power is tilted in its favor. This claim is familiar, as is the response from its critics, who claim that the surest way to respect the Charter is to end the war that has shaped Russia’s position for more than three years.
