A residential apartment block in Dnipro hit by a Russian missile on 14th January 2023

This morning the DT’s live Ukraine feed carried a brief report of comments by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s, revealing the Kremlin’s real interest in peace talks with Ukraine, ie, it doesn’t have any.  The war is for empire and geopolitics, not for ethnic Russians in Ukraine (or in Russia).  The Kremlin’s interest is that the United States “negotiates” giving up of its status as global hegemon in exchange for Putin making nice with Zelensky for five minutes.  Lavrov actually means that American maintenance of the rules-based international order has to be ended so Russia can upgrade its non-rules-based, eurasionist model of imperial power to a global level.

I would remind readers that the Kremlin power elites define multipolarity as a collection of economic blocs, each led by a dominant power.  The model allows the Kremlin to piggy-back (with “no limits”) off the China’s inevitably global hegemony - as close as it can get to hegemon itself.

Here is the report:

Any Ukraine peace talks should be about ‘new world order’

Moscow wants any Ukraine peace talks to focus on creating a “new world order”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on a visit to Turkey on Friday.

He also threatened to abandon a landmark grain deal, which Turkey helped broker, if obstacles to Russian exports remain.

“Any negotiation needs to be based on taking into account Russian interests, Russian concerns,” Lavrov said.

“It should be about the principles on which the new world order will be based.”

He added that Russia rejects a “unipolar world order led by ‘one hegemon’”.