Russian envoy criticises US summit for democracy

The Russian embassy in Dhaka has criticised US President Joe Biden's summit for democracy, saying it is the major vehicle of the US grand strategy to undermine the role of the UN.

It is also designed to cobble together American satellites on a broad agenda, starting from climate change and vaccination to military diplomacy, and the creation of political and military-technological regional blocs like QUAD and AUKUS.

Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Bangladesh Alexander Mantytskiy made the remarks in a statement yesterday as the Russia-Ukraine war approaches its first anniversary on February 24.

The rivalry between the US-led western bloc and the Russia-China bloc rose to its peak in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The US and European Union have imposed dozens of sanctions against Russia, saying that Russia violated international law by invading Ukraine.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, considers democracy and human rights as key to its foreign policy. In 2021, it began the democracy summit. The second summit for democracy will be held on March 29-30, 2023. Bangladesh was invited to neither of the summits.

Mantytskiy also said the first summit took place under the pretext of rallying up countries to protect democracy across the world. However, in reality, it was used to aggressively promote neo-liberal values by replacing democracy with democratism, which boils down to the unlimited power of the elites under merely formal democratic institutions.

The organisers also sought to create a broad anti-Russia and anti-China front based on ideology, according to Mantytskiy.

"Needless to say, such 'summits' only fuel international tensions and draw up new dividing lines, splitting the world into "friends" and "foes," stigmatising countries, pinning them down with labels, and enforcing an undefined 'rules-based order'," he said in the statement.

Mantytskiy also said the US hypocritically assesses the "quality of democracy" in a country, implying that democracies can be of different qualities.