Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

AUKUS, QUAD alliances created by US erode cooperation format in ASEAN, top diplomat says

MOSCOW (TASS) -- New AUKUS alliance between the US, the UK, and Australia as well as the four-sided dialogue on security between the US, Japan, India, and Australia (QUAD) are directed at eroding the long-standing universal formats of cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region existing under the auspices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the 29th Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy on Saturday.
The Russian top diplomat noted, “one of the most fashionable trends today is the so-called Indo-Pacific strategies that are invented by the United States,” in particular, AUKUS and QUAD.
“All of this follows the line of eroding the universal formats in the Asia-Pacific Region which existed for the past decades under the auspices of ASEAN,” he noted.
The minister named “East Asian summits, the ASEAN security forum, meetings of ASEAN defense ministers and partners, the so-called ASEAN+, and a number of other formats” based on the “principle of consensus” among such universal formats.
“All of them involved all key countries of this region without exception, including China, India, Japan, and the Russian Federation on the basis of equality and mutual consideration of interests,” he continued.

(Latest Update October 14, 2021)