The Russian defense minister’s statement comes in response to a broader comment by Ash Carter, the US Secretary of State for Defense, in which he accuses Russia of trying to “erode” the international order and that its actions are a danger to collective security. CBS News reports on the speech given at Oxford University by the American representative. He repeated the United States’ dissatisfaction with Russia’s support for President Bashar Al-Assad and the fact that the Federation’s current behavior is “eroding” the world order.
The Kremlin’s point of view was summarized by Sergei Shoigu’s statement and is within the normal parameters of the Russian perspective. The antithesis between the two states, especially as a result of Russia’s post-Yeltsin revival, reached an important point at the time of the change of the pole of power in Ukraine, but decisions and movements on the global level, prior to this event, prefigured antagonistic positions.
In connection with the world order and the international community, Russia is intensively promoting the concept of a “multipolar world” or, as Sergei Lavrov calls it, a “polycentric international architecture”. The world is already moving in this direction, and Russia’s positioning as the leader of such a current of thought is more of a conjunctural order, but of great importance for ensuring the transition to the multipolar order. The danger that Carter speaks of is in a way a real one because it is aimed at the dissolution of an interstate system or rather the transition of such a system, which after the dissolution of the USSR acquired a monolithic character, towards a network of power centers.