RT-Engels: 16-05-2025,
Russia’s foreign minister said attempts were being made to provoke a serious clash between the Asian giants
The West is attempting to provoke tensions between India and China by pitting them against each other, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said, according to TASS.
“Take note of the current developments in the Asia-Pacific region, which the West has started calling the Indo-Pacific region to give its policy a clear anti-China orientation — expecting thereby to additionally make our great friends and neighbours India and China clash,” Lavrov was cited as saying on Thursday at a meeting of the ‘Culture without Borders’ diplomatic club.
Lavrov also claimed Western countries are attempting to diminish the influence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the region.
ASEAN is a grouping of ten countries in Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – which aims to promote economic and security cooperation among its members.
“Western colleagues, as in any other part of the world, want to play a major role here, they want to undermine the central role of ASEAN, which has suited everyone for many, many decades and was based on the formation of a unifying space by the ASEAN countries and their partners in dialogue both in the field of politics and in the field of military cooperation, in the field of defense,” Lavrov was quoted as saying by TASS.