While touring Africa in January 2023, Russian FM Lavrov said it is sad that most European and Western foreign policy initiatives ‘remain imbued with a neo-colonial mentality, a neo-colonial logic based on the divide et impera – divide and rule – principle’. It feels as if that Russia itself is clean as a whistle, and there is nothing to blame it in this regard. But, is it really so?
Here’s what else is important to know while considering such questions. When saying something like this, Sergey Lavrov (as well as other representatives of Moscow) usually draws a parallel between not only nowadays Russia and the West, but also tsarist Russia and Western colonial powers of the 19th and 20th century. So last summer, Russian FM blamed Western sanctions for the food crisis in Africa and asserted that in contrast to the U.K., France, Belgium and other European powers, Russia ‘has not stained itself with the bloody crimes of colonialism’.
Those words have not gone unnoticed in the West. Here is what Casey Michel, an investigative journalist based in New York City, said in this regard: Russia’s campaigns of conquest and subjugation “were no less bloody for advancing overland, not overseas. Russia never had formal colonies in Africa, Latin America or South Asia. But the idea that the Kremlin avoided colonization projects altogether – that it dodged the ‘bloody crimes’ for which Dutch, Spanish or Portuguese empires were responsible – is as risible as it is ahistorical… Too many either don’t know or ignore that Russia was, and remains, a major colonial power. From the Caucasus to Crimea, from the Arctic to the Amur, from the Volga to the Pacific, Russia’s colonial campaigns conquered innumerable nations – decimating local cultures, bulldozing local sovereignty, and engaging in genocidal practices”.
His piece got a wide negative resonance in the Russian mainstream media because the appearance of such an article in the press having…
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