'Just More Hot Air' — State Department Rejects Lavrov's "Western Monopoly" Comments

Washington D.C./16.02.23/Turan:   Washington on Wednesday rejected Russia's top diplomat's accusations that the West has been trying to "monopolize" global affairs, calling Sergey Lavrov's comments “just more hot air,” TURAN's U.S. correspondent reports.

"These are not what the West or what the United States and our allies and partners have constructed." State Department's spokesperson Ned Price told a daily press briefing when responding to TURAN's questions.

What Lavrov is taking issue with – the rules-based international order, the concepts that were written into the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,– is something all U.N. member-states are bound to uphold, he added. “Last time I checked, Russia still is a member-state of the U.N,” Price said.

He went on to add, "So any effort to paint these as the West imposing its rules or its views on any other country is nothing more than just more hot air, just more disinformation from our Russian counterparts, who have had no shortage of it in recent months."

Lavron on Wednesday was quoted as telling the State Duma that the government's new “foreign policy concept” would focus on ending the West’s “monopoly” over global affairs. He said the “rules-based order” was something invented in Washington, London, and Brussels to further their own interests.

Price, in hir turn, rejected the claim that the U.S. has been trying to monopolize global relations.

It is Russia, he said, which was “attempting to impose its will on sovereign countries,” citing its invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago.

“We see it most vividly on Ukraine, where Russia has sent its forces, with all of their brutality, in an effort to impose its will over the people of Ukraine, to remove the government of Ukraine, and to deprive Ukraine of its sovereignty, its independence, its democracy,” Ptice said.

"We’ve seen Russia act that way in less acute – using less acute tactics in the context of countries throughout the region," he added.

Alex Raufoglu