Moscow Trying to Rebuild ‘Empire’ Says Poland as European Leaders Walk Out of Russian Foreign Minister Meeting

Poland’s Foreign Minister said Russia should be kicked out of a Cold War-era body created to de-escalate nuclear tensions because it is trying to rebuild its former empire, as several European delegations protested a Russian speech by leaving the room.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made his first trip to a European Union member state on Thursday since the renewed invasion of Ukraine to attend the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in Malta. A group of the European states who feel most keenly threatened by Russian expansionism — all of them controlled by Soviet Russia to greater or lesser extents in the 20th century — signalled their displeasure at Lavrov’s presence by walking out of the conference as he rose to speak.

Apparently leading the dissenting faction was Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, a political veteran and husband of American journalist Anne Applebaum, who said before the meeting he would not stand for the Russian’s presence. Polish state television reported him as having said in the morning: “Mr Lavrov is coming here to lie about the Russian invasion and what Russia is doing in Ukraine and I’m not going to listen to those lies.”

Mr Sikorski later stated of the meeting: “I told the Russian delegation that we will not succumb to this cascade of lies, which we have heard again from its representatives. We know what they are doing – trying to rebuild the Russian empire. There is no consent to this, as in the past, we will oppose it”.

The OSCE walkout was by the delegations from Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Czechia.

Sikorski said because of Russia’s actions against Ukraine, the nation should be suspended from the OSCE until they end the war, stating the Organisation had been “paralysed” by having Russia as a member.

Yet the demand would undermine the purpose of the OSCE existing in the first place. Created during the Cold War as a means to provide a forum for discussion between otherwise isolated nuclear powers to prevent escalation, conflict, and crises, it essentially serves no purpose whatsoever if the United States and Russia are not both members and talking to each other. The United State’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken remained in the room while the central European states walked out, but broadly speaking dialogue between Washington and Moscow appears to have been suspended for many months, although that may be on the verge of change.

Russia has recently claimed through its state media that the Cold War-era hotline — known in popular culture as the ‘red phone’ — between Moscow and Washington D.C. has fallen out of use, removing one possible avenue for crisis de-escalation. But in a possible slight thawing, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Brown spoke by telephone with his Russian counterpart General Valery Gerasimov on Thursday for the first time.

A U.S. spokesman is reported to have said of the call: “The leaders discussed a number of global and regional security issues to include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.”

Russia had its own theatrics at the OSCE meeting in Malta on Thursday, with Foreign Minister Lavrov accusing Western states of escalating Ukraine and then leaving before anyone else had a chance to respond. He told the meeting the Russian view was that Western involvement in Ukraine was engineered by resident Biden to erase the shame of his Afghan withdrawal.

He said: “After the Afghan disgrace, there was a need for a new common enemy… he result is the reincarnation of the Cold War, but now with the far greater risk of its escalation into the hot phase.”