West using fake news against Global South – Lavrov

The US and its allies resort to sleazy methods because they can no longer compete fairly, the Russian foreign minister has said Fake news has become a routine Western tool for undermining competitors, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

He argued that Western media have conditioned their audiences to believe negative reporting about countries portrayed as adversaries.

Russia’s top diplomat made the remarks during the opening ceremony of an international forum in Moscow dedicated to combating fake news.

RT has collected the highlights from Lavrov’s speech.

West abuses new technology to ‘derail multipolar world’ Modern information technology allows “any piece of news, even unverified or obviously fake, to be disseminated to millions, if not billions of people,” Lavrov warned.

Western officials exploit this environment to “derail the creation of a just multipolar world order,” he added.

According to Lavrov, fake news is part of a broader set of tools the West uses against nations of the Global South.

Western efforts to obfuscate and distort the truth reflect a broader trend: its fear to compete honestly in virtually every sphere of human activity.

Unilateral economic sanctions , tariffs , and accusations of “industrial overcapacity” are being used against China, Lavrov said.

Meanwhile, diplomatic pressure and blackmail in international organizations serve to obscure the fact that “on many key issues of modern development the West would have been left in absolute minority, should the voting be conducted fairly.” Russia became a target after rejecting ‘neocolonialist cooperation’ Lavrov said Western pressure against Russia intensified in the early 2000s, when the country “began to liberate itself from neocolonial forms of cooperation with our Western colleagues.” That shift prompted the West to pursue a policy of containing Russia, he argued.

Read more ‘Bucha massacre’ a false flag orchestrated by UK – Moscow The minister cited several cases in which serious accusations were leveled against Moscow while, according to Lavrov, Russian requests for supporting evidence were rejected.

He focused in particular on the so-called “Bucha massacre” – alleged mass killings of civilians near Kiev in 2022 that Moscow maintains were a Western-backed fabrication.

Lavrov criticized UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for lending credence to the accusations and urged the public to examine a recent Russian investigation.

He said researchers used publicly available Ukrainian sources, including obituaries and government databases, to trace people whose names Kiev placed on a memorial to alleged Russian victims in Bucha.