‘Playing Monopoly’: Lavrov blasts leaders who put selfish interests ahead of saving lives during pandemic

The elites who rule the West have put selfish or ideological goals first when choosing their response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s foreign minister has said in a scathing op-ed.

The ongoing health crisis has exposed the incompetence and failure to adapt that powerful people in the West suffer from. Those people are stuck in the kind of thinking that simply does not work in the globalized world, Sergey Lavrov wrote in a piece published by the Chinese outlet Global Times on Thursday.

The coronavirus came as “an instruction for humility,” said Lavrov, as it posed a threat to all people and nations regardless of their location, wealth, or political preferences. It was a problem that nobody could “sit out in a safe haven, behind moats and walls” or “solve at the expense of others.”

Faced with this challenge, some nations have failed to live up to the values they preach, exposing a “deficiency of humanism,” an “incurable condition” that the ruling elites in those countries suffer from, Lavrov argued. Instead of promoting cooperation, they chose “predatory approaches” and “played the game of Monopoly” in pursuit of selfish goals and settling scores with their “geopolitical opponents.”

Those who are used to declaring – or declaiming – their moral superiority and rich democratic traditions, are shedding basic properties and ethical inhibitions and acting according to the law of the jungle.

In recent months, the countries' responses to the crisis have been unable to avoid taking on political connotations. Washington has continued its attempts to blame China for starting the pandemic and has made accusations against the World Health Organization. It also refused to lift sanctions from countries like Iran and Venezuela for the duration of the crisis.

At the same time, in Europe, Italy faced criticism for accepting humanitarian aid from Russia and China. Behavior like this, Lavrov noted, shows that “the much-lauded solidarity of the Euroatlantic brand is valued more than the lives and health of tens of thousands of common citizens.”

Ironically, Lavrov said, the ultra-liberal economic model that the West peddles to the rest of the world has proven to be a failure when dealing with the pandemic. Nations with “working mobilization mechanisms, clearly defined sovereign interests and original value systems” have dealt with it in more robust ways.

The elites who rule the West have put selfish or ideological goals first when choosing their response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s foreign minister has said in a scathing op-ed.

Lavrov suggested that people throughout the world, and especially in Europe, need to learn a lesson from this pandemic. He added that it was time for Europeans to stop looking “to other parts of the world” for “existential guidance” and military protection, which “denies the European Union a chance to establish itself as an independent center of influence in the multipolar world.”

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