Lavrov Accuses US of Trying to Distract Global Attention from Palestine

(MENAFN) Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov charged Wednesday that Washington is deliberately stoking international disputes across multiple fronts to divert global attention away from the Palestinian cause, warning that the absence of a Palestinian state risks entrenching regional instability for generations.

Speaking in an interview with a TV channel, Lavrov argued that a string of US-driven confrontations — spanning Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, and Canada — were systematically pulling international focus away from resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"All of the efforts that are being taken right now on Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Greenland, and now Canada ... all of these issues are moving us away from settling the most protracted, the most negative crisis in the world – that is, the crisis around Palestine," he said.

Lavrov also took direct aim at American proposals for the future of the Gaza Strip, dismissing them as silent on the question of Palestinian statehood. He further alleged that plans to provoke hostility toward Tehran were partly designed to sabotage a potential rapprochement between Iran and Arab states.

"I have no doubt that when plans to stir up aggression against Iran were being hatched, one of the goals was to prevent the normalization of relations between Iran and the Arab states," he said.

The minister went further, alleging a concerted effort to coerce Gulf states into abandoning the Palestinian cause as the price of normalizing ties with Israel. "Now, everything is being done to ensure that reconciliation never happens ... and to pull its other Gulf neighbors into structures that, first, will not focus on resolving the Palestinian issue, and second, will force them to betray the Palestinian cause as the price for normalizing relations with Israel," he added.

Without a viable Palestinian state, Lavrov cautioned, the region faces decades of festering instability and extremism. "We are returning to a period when everything is decided by force and international law is ignored," he said.

India-Pakistan Tensions
Turning to the escalating standoff between India and Pakistan, Lavrov suggested that outside powers may be actively inflaming the dispute, framing it as part of a broader Western effort to obstruct deeper Eurasian integration — particularly within multilateral frameworks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

"The West would prefer that countries in the region remain preoccupied with disputes among themselves rather than focus on the task we discussed today – the development of Eurasian continental integration. Such integration does not align with Western interests," he said.

Lavrov also spotlighted the depth of the longstanding military-technical partnership between Moscow and New Delhi, noting that bilateral defense cooperation had matured well beyond conventional arms sales into full-scale joint production ventures — among them BrahMos missiles, Kalashnikov rifles, and licensed manufacturing of T-90 tanks on Indian soil.

"India's defense capability is an area of our relations where we have practically no secrets from our Indian friends," Lavrov said.

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