Russia’s foreign minister questions the US government’s willingness to negotiate

[…] The global arena is undergoing a transformation that began some time ago with the objective transition toward a multipolar world order. This is neither the bipolarity of the Soviet-American era with the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, nor the unipolarity that emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Instead, it is multipolarity that is shaping the trajectory of global development. For many years, the United States functioned as the engine of the global economy and the regulator of international finance, using the role of the dollar to reinforce its dominant position. It is now, objectively, losing economic significance and influence within the global system. Meanwhile, countries such as the People’s Republic of China, India, and Brazil are rising. Significant developments are also taking place across Africa, where nations are increasingly seeking to develop domestic industry rather than simply export natural resources – an effort that the Soviet Union once supported.
    Multiple centres of rapid economic growth, power, and financial and political influence have thus emerged. The world is being reshaped through competition. The West is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions. Moreover, with the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit. Indeed, the Trump administration openly asserts its ambition to dominate in the energy sector and harness their competitors.
    Blatantly unfair methods are being used against us: the operations of Russian oil companies such as Lukoil and Rosneft are being banned, and there are attempts to dictate and restrict Russia’s trade, investment cooperation, and military-technical ties with our major strategic partners, including India as well as other BRICS states.
    A struggle is underway to preserve the old-world order, one built around the dominance of the dollar and the rules formulated and enforced by the West through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation. When the new centres of growth, operating under these very rules, began to demonstrate far more substantial economic results and significantly higher growth rates – as is evident across the BRICS countries – the West started seeking ways to block this transition. This cannot succeed, because it is an objective, irreversible process. For several years now, the BRICS countries’ growth rates and GDP volumes have, in terms of purchasing power parity, substantially exceeded the combined GDP of the G7.
    These global economic processes – both the objective emergence of new development centres as well as the subjective efforts by established powers, which are losing their influence, to hinder this natural evolution – form the foundation of our work, which involves not solely global analytical forecasting but also practical bilateral cooperation with each individual country. All of these geopolitical confrontations, along with the attempts to derail the objective course of history, inevitably affect bilateral relations. I am not going to mention them all; those include sanctions, the so-called “shadow fleet” invented by the West, attempts to detain vessels by military force in the open sea in blatant violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and much more. Tariffs imposed for purchasing oil or gas from certain suppliers have now become commonplace. […]
    […] the West is losing its hegemony but keeps on clinging to the institutions set up to secure that hegemony, which by default can no longer reflect the real situation and the fair nature of interactions at the international level, the establishment of new entities to facilitate international economic, investment, trade, and transport links is inevitable.
    We are not advocating for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO to cease their existence. For many years since the establishment of BRICS, we have been seeking a reform of these institutions so that the member states (and these were and still are the fastest growing world economies and trading powers) receive votes and rights in all those Bretton Woods institutions commensurate with their real weight in the world economy, trade and logistics.
    The West is trying to oppose it categorically. President Putin has said on many occasions that we are not the ones refusing to use the dollar. The United States under President Joe Biden did everything to make the dollar a weapon against those who are deemed objectionable.
    I would note that, for all the statements from President Donald Trump’s administration to the effect that the war in Ukraine started by President Biden should be ended, that we should come to terms and remove it from the agenda, and that supposedly then we would see bright and clear prospects of Russian-US mutually beneficial investment and other interaction, the administration has not challenged all the laws adopted by Joe Biden to “punish” Russia after the start of the special military operation.
    In April 2025, they extended Executive Order 14024, on the emergency regime, the core of which is the “punishment” of Russia and sanctions against our country, including the freezing of Russia’s gold and currency reserves. That document mentions “harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation.” […] You can find anything there!
    This is all pure “Bidenism,” which President Trump and his team reject. Nevertheless, they have easily pushed through the law and sanctions against Russia, which continue to be in effect. They have imposed sanctions against Lukoil and Rosneft. And they did it in the autumn, a couple of weeks after a good meeting between President Putin and President Trump in Anchorage.
    They tell us that the Ukraine problem should be resolved. In Anchorage, we accepted the US proposal. […] President Putin has said on many occasions that it is not important for Russia what Ukraine and Europe are going to say; we can clearly see the primitive Russophobia of most regimes in the European Union, with rare exceptions. The US position was important to us. By accepting their proposal, we seem to have completed the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and moving on to a full-scale, broad-based and mutually beneficial cooperation.
    So far, the reality is quite the opposite: new sanctions are imposed, a “war” against tankers in the open sea is being waged in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. They are trying to ban India and our other partners from buying cheap, affordable Russian energy resources (Europe has long been banned) and are forcing them to buy US LNG at exorbitant prices. This means that the Americans have set themselves the task of achieving economic domination.
    Furthermore, while they ostensibly made a proposal regarding Ukraine and we were ready to accept it (now they are not), we do not see any bright future in the economic sphere either. The Americans want to take control of all the routes for providing the world’s leading countries and all continents with energy resources. On the European continent, they are eyeing the Nord Streams, which were blown up three years ago, the Ukrainian gas transportation system and the TurkStream.
    This illustrates that the US objective – to dominate the world economy – is being realised using a fairly large number of coercive measures that are incompatible with fair competition. Tariffs, sanctions, direct prohibitions, forbidding some from engaging with others – we have to take all of this into account.
    While remaining open, just like India, China, Indonesia and Brazil, to cooperation with all countries, including a major power such as the United States, we are in a situation where the Americans themselves are creating artificial obstacles along the way. We are forced to look for additional secure ways to develop our financial, economic, integration, logistics and other projects with the BRICS countries. […]
    All this is not to spite anyone, especially the United States. This is due to the fact that the United States seeks to bring all processes in the areas I mentioned under its strict control and demands unilateral concessions. Without giving up contacts with them, to the extent that they are willing to engage on a mutually beneficial basis, we are interested, together with our BRICS partners, in creating an architecture that will not be subject to the illegal actions of one or another player from the Western flank. […]

Source: mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/2078196/ of 9 February 2026