🎙 Briefing by Foreign Ministry Information and Press Department’s Deputy Director Andrey Nastasin (July 31, 2024)

🔹 Assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh
🔹 Israel’s strike against Beirut
🔹 Ukrainian crisis
🔹 Kiev’s decision to cut off the Druzhba oil pipeline
🔹 Situation in Moldova
🔹 Japan and the US renew an agreement on the parameters of lethal arms exports
🔹 Statements by IOC President Thomas Bach
🔹 Interim results of Russia’s #CIS Chairmanship in the first six months of 2024
🔹 80 years of liberating Kaunas from Nazi invaders
🔹 The 80th Anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Lebanon
🔹 Prospects of #RussiaALBA cooperation

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#KievRegimeCrimes

❗️Kiev continues to detain church hierarchs under far-fetched pretexts, holding them under arrest for months without recourse to court, and openly declaring its desire to use the clergy in POW swaps.

Illegal takeovers of Ukrainian Orthodox Church churches by representatives of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian police continue.

▪️ July 11 – the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Kiev Region was taken away from the believers;
▪️ July 18 – St Nicholas Church in the Khmelnytsky Region was taken away;
▪️ June 28 – a court in Ternopol denied the UOC the right to use the local cathedral;
▪️ July 5 – a Kiev court seized the Yeletsky Monastery from the UOC.

No matter how hard Zelensky’s regime tries to fulfill the its American masters’ order to destroy canonical Orthodoxy, he will not succeed. True faith will forever remain in the hearts of millions of Ukrainians.

#Moldova

⚠️ We have repeatedly pointed out that the Moldovan authorities are leading the country along the same path as that taken by Ukraine and the Baltic states. This trend continues. On July 25, Prime Minister Dorin Recean welcomed the launch of a Moldovan website identical to the Ukrainian Myrotvorets facility. According to him, initiatives like this one are what will help build Moldova’s “European future.”

Such unrealistic statements and incompetent actions by the country’s leadership are causing growing protests not only in Moldova itself, but also in Moldovan diasporas abroad, including in Western Europe. <...>

👉 All of this is a logical outcome of the policy aimed at dismantling the country’s statehood and national identity and at renouncing the traditional values.

It is for a reason that the Moldovans display warm feelings towards Russia, which has always treated Moldova as an equal partner, and openly laugh at the “Russian threat” allegations. We remain friends. All attempts to destroy this are doomed.

#Announcement

⚡️ The deadline for submitting applications for the BRICS Solutions Awards competition has been extended until August 30, 2024.

Within the framework of the BRICS Solutions Awards contest, the participants are encouraged to share their projects and ideas under the following eight categories:

• New Industry and Energy;
• Biotechnology and National Health;
• Sky, Space and Communication Technologies;
• Artificial Intelligence and Digital Services;
• Climate and Environmental Technologies;
• Platforms and End-to-End Solutions for Government and Public Administration;
• Competences and Staff Development;
• Cognitive Technologies and Creative Economy.

Applications have already been received from 🇮🇳 India, 🇧🇷 Brazil, 🇿🇦 South Africa, 🇨🇳 China, 🇪🇬 Egypt and 🇪🇹 Ethiopia. Most of the projects were received in the nomination "New Industry and Energy", in the second place — "Platforms and integrated solutions for government and public administration".

Applications will be accepted at the official website. The BRICS Solutions Awards will conclude with a solemn award ceremony at the BRICS Business Forum in Moscow in October 2024.

📖 For reference:

The BRICS Solutions Awards was first held in 2020 during Russia's BRICS Chairmanship at the initiative of the Autonomous Nonprofit Organization "Agency for Strategic Initiatives to Promote New Projects" and with the support of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Since then, it has been held every year in a BRICS chairing country. In 2021 and 2022 India and China hosted the event.

#BRICS

🇺🇳 The Russian Federation completed its Presidency in the United Nations Security Council on July 31. Its packed agenda revolved around three central events, with the first two of them attended by FM Sergey Lavrov.

On July 16, we held a high-level open debate titled “Multilateral cooperation in the interest of a more just, democratic and sustainable world order,” which reaffirmed the need to hold detailed discussions dealing with the underpinnings of the emerging multipolar world order, the objective to reinforce a UN-centred system of international relations, as well as the need to carry out a comprehensive review of the root causes of present-day conflicts and to consolidate our efforts in order to overcome them. The fact that the Global Majority tends to distrust the infamous Western concept of a rules-based world order was also mentioned during the debate.

On July 17, the Security Council held a quarterly ministerial-level debate on the agenda item titled “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.” During this meeting, participants discussed the situation in the region with all its tension, while placing a special emphasis on the escalating violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict zone for finding ways out of this unprecedented crisis. In addition to this, the UNSC held separate meetings on July 26 and 31 on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the assassination of the Hamas Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

On July 19, the UNSC held a debate titled “Cooperation between the United Nations and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (#CSTO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (#CIS), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (#SCO).” In his remarks, Deputy FM Sergey Vershinin stressed the importance for the UN to work closer with constructive regional organisations. <...>

In addition to this, Russia’s UNSC Presidency included all the events as part of the mandate-reporting cycle.

👉 The Middle East bloc included meetings on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
👉 The African agenda covered discussions of the situation in West Africa, the Sahara and Sahel region, and the DR Congo.
👉 The council also touched upon peacebuilding efforts in Columbia and the start of deploying the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti.
👉 We exchanged views on the activities of the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia and the Cyprus settlement.

❗️The Ukraine crisis remained high on the agenda. On July 9, Western countries convened a Security Council meeting in connection with the tragic incident involving a children’s hospital in Kiev. During the debate, the Russian delegation refuted accusations by its opponents and shared evidence demonstrating that the Ukrainian air defence systems were to blame for the incident. On July 25, Russia initiated a UNSC meeting to discuss the unrelenting flow of Western weapons into Ukraine, which delays a settlement in this conflict and leads to more victims.

The Security Council adopted four resolutions in July:

✅ on focusing the CAR arms embargo on illegal armed groups;
✅ extending the mandates for the UN Mission to support the Hodeidah Agreement and the UN Integrated Office in Haiti;
✅ regarding the UN Focal Point on delisting-related matters and re-establishing the Informal Working Group of the Security Council on General UNSC Sanctions Issues.

🇺🇳 Russia went to great lengths to enable the Security Council to be effective and responsive in its work. We encouraged our colleagues within the Council to come up with collective responses when dealing with challenges to peace and security, while seeking guidance from a holistic view of the purposes and principles set forth in the UN Charter and their inter-connected nature. The central events on the agenda of the Russian Presidency attracted a lot of attention within the international community, reaffirming our country’s high authority and the respect it commands as a UN founding member and permanent member of the Security Council.

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#RussiaUN