Lavrov at the UN: The Target List and the Letter of Nine
The Russian foreign minister treated multipolarity as an ongoing process and organized his speech in four parts: a dated list of targets of US uses of force, the reform Moscow wants at the UN, the letter born outside it with nine signatures, and Ukraine with no new script.
(p) On September 26, 2026, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov took the podium of the general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York with a diagnosis that asks for no one’s endorsement: the tectonic shifts in world politics are already underway, and the multipolar order is being born before our eyes. The countries of the South and the Global East, he said, are establishing themselves as “sovereign centers of development” and taking charge of the security of their own regions. The Western minority, which, in his words, ruled for five centuries at the expense of others’ resources, increasingly resorts to force and tries to impose its own “rules.” To sum up the adversary, Lavrov quoted Vladimir Putin: the dictatorship of a single hegemon “has gone mad and is simply dangerous for everyone around it.”
The speech has four parts, and the first is an inventory of accusations with a date attached to each item. Venezuela opens the list: the US invasion in early 2026, he said, ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, held without trial in a US prison, and the demand is their immediate release, based on the immunities that international law grants heads of state.
(p) The longest item is Iran. Lavrov described the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, members of his family, and military and political officials of the Islamic Republic as “yet another unacceptable manifestation” of imposition by force (source). And he dated the campaign: the American and Israeli aggression, in his formulation, began in June 2025 and targeted not only the country’s civilian infrastructure but also peaceful nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards — which, in his assessment, caused irreparable damage to the agency’s authority and to the entire nonproliferation regime.
The Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf close this block: recurrences of armed confrontation continue, with evident damage to global navigation and trade, and the condition Moscow sets for defusing the crisis is trust between the Arab states of the Gulf and Iran, within the framework of the collective security proposal for the region presented by Russia. On Palestine, the target of his accusation is the Security Council itself. The 20-point peace plan presented by the United States and endorsed in Resolution 2803 has not stopped the killing of elderly people, women and children in Gaza, and the international stabilization force it provides for remains undeployed. Russia abstained in that vote, and the reason Lavrov gave for the abstention is straightforward: the text did not mention the UN a single time, and the abstention complied with a request from the majority of Arab countries, with China doing the same. In the West Bank, he pointed to the expansion of settlements and the decisions on East Jerusalem, which, if implemented, sever the link between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
“If things continue like this, it will be impossible to create a Palestinian state. There simply will be no land left for it.”
Cuba closes the American chapter, with the demand to suspend the maritime blockade and remove the country from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, on the argument of unprecedented pressure from the northern neighbor. Outside the continent, the inventory reaches the Balkans, and there the accusation changes address and goes to Brussels: the European Union, he said, ignores Security Council Resolution 1244 and pushes Serbia to sanction Russia, while the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina are pressured to give up constitutional competencies guaranteed by the Dayton Agreement.
The reform he wants to decide in New York
Of the four parts, the second is the one that matters to those following the UN. Lavrov rejected any new permanent seat for Western countries, “much less” for Germany and Japan, which, according to him, have taken a path of militarization and revanchism, and he nominally endorsed the candidacies of Brazil and India for permanent membership, along with increased African representation under the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration.
(p) The other item with a deadline is the selection of the new secretary-general, which the Assembly must make by the end of 2026. The criterion he set is impartiality: someone who represents all members, who does not take sides when the Council is divided, who does not hollow out the prerogatives of the Security Council or the intergovernmental nature of the institution. In the press conference that followed, he was blunter about the current management: the team led by António Guterres promotes biased approaches and “double standards” and, in practice, serves a group of Western countries. The figure he gave to back the accusation is this: seven or eight of the most important posts in the Secretariat are held by citizens or subjects of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states.
(p) The proof of double standards he chose is Greenland. Asked about the matter, Guterres and his spokesman answer that the issue must be resolved on the basis of the UN Charter, General Assembly resolutions, Denmark’s territorial integrity and the Greenlanders’ right to self-determination. Lavrov said he had posed the question to the secretary-general himself, days earlier: why does self-determination never appear as an option when the subject is Ukraine? And he added what undercuts the answer he received: the United States, Denmark and Greenland have signed agreements that expand American military control over the island and lock in that presence forever, including in the event of a self-determination referendum.
The letter born outside it
The third part is the one that depends on no vote at all. The day before the speech, September 25, 2026, nine states signed in New York the communiqué that launches the negotiation of the Eurasian Charter on Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century: Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam. The text reaffirms the central role of the UN, creates a working group with decisions by consensus, and opens the negotiation to all interested Eurasian states. About 10 delegations, Lavrov said at the press conference, have already asked to join the group of experts, which will begin work before the end of the year.
(p) Among the nine signatories, there is no China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey or Indonesia. That absence highlights the difference between the two institutional moves of Moscow’s speech: while reform of the UN Security Council depends on the support of major powers of the Global South, the Charter already gathers a narrower group of countries willing to join the Russian initiative, with no need for negotiation or approval within the United Nations. Nothing in the communiqué suggests that Russia intends to replace the UN: the text says the opposite, and Lavrov presented the initiative as a complement to, and harmonization of, existing mechanisms. What the September 25 signature measures is the asymmetry: nine states manage to rally around a document of their own; the Security Council reform, which needs Brazil and India, remains without consensus.
Ukraine, with no new script
The fourth part is Ukraine, where nothing has changed. Lavrov repeated the justification for the operation launched in 2022 to protect Donbass and Novorossiya, said the objectives will be achieved “despite any circumstances,” and blamed Europe for the blockade of negotiations: in his view, the Europeans arm Kyiv, help target civilians and civilian infrastructure in Russia, and frustrate talks in which many are interested, “including the Donald Trump administration.” The chain of episodes he offered as proof is the same one he has repeated for years: the February 2014 agreement guaranteed by Germany, France and Poland and broken the next day, the sabotaged Minsk Agreements, the Paris summit of December 2019, the Istanbul understandings of April 2022 abandoned after the intervention of then British prime minister Boris Johnson, and what he calls the American retreat in Alaska. The Security Council's special meeting on Ukraine, convened by France on September 23, 2026, heard the same chronology from him three days earlier.
He devoted the final passage to what he calls the legacy of Nazism, on the 80th anniversary of the end of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which falls on October 1, 2026. He accused the governments of the European Union of tolerating “Ukrainian Nazism” while the Russian language is banned in Ukraine, and called out German chancellor Friedrich Merz over his promise to make Germany “once again” Europe's leading military power. He also returned to the Bucha episode of April 2022 to claim the scene was staged and that the names inscribed on the city's memorial are those of war criminals. The claim is a thesis of the Russian government backed by a report from a Russian civil society movement.
The only recorded response from one of the targets on that same Saturday, September 26, 2026, came from Berlin: Lavrov and German foreign minister Johann Wadephul met for 20 minutes, in the first ministerial meeting between the two countries since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and German diplomatic sources said Wadephul asked Moscow to abandon the “dangerous path of escalation” against Germany, Europe and NATO. That same day, cross-border attacks between Russia and Ukraine left at least seven dead, four in Ukrainian regions and three in Krasnodar, in southern Russia, according to accounts from authorities on both sides.
By December 2026, the UN will elect the new secretary-general and the working group of the Eurasian Charter will begin to operate. If the reform and the selection of the Secretariat go Moscow's way, the Charter becomes bargaining currency within the United Nations system; if they do not, it is already written, with nine signatures and a negotiation open to anyone who wants to join, without depending on a vote in New York. That double bet is what the speech of September 26 leaves behind as its program.