On February 28, 2023, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared that threats made by the European Union (EU) to punish third countries for failing to abide with its anti-Russian sanctions will only increase the isolation of the West from the rest of the world.
“There is no doubt whatsoever that the EU’s threats, as part of its package adopted recently, to punish third countries for their failure to comply with anti-Russian restrictions, will only strengthen the world’s rejection of the neocolonial, in fact, the dictatorial policies of the West,” Sakharova declared in a statement.
TASS reported that on February 25, the European Union dished out its 10th package of sanctions on Russia, imposing restrictions on Russian Human Rights Council Valery Fadeyev, surgeon Leonid Roshal, head of the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation Yevgeny Primakov, Deputy Prime Minister of the Moscow Region Vyacheslav Dukhin and Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova and 82 other Russian nationals.
Moskalkova said to TASS that EU sanctions had a negative effect on human rights diplomacy, which is designed to help people. The irony about the “open-minded” West and its open society principles is that its fanatic commitment to wokism and the dissemination of liberal democracy is making it an unattractive partner on the world stage.
As a result, more countries in the Global South and even some Western countries such as Hungary will begin to forge more transactional relations with Russia and China — two actors that aren’t as ideologically reductionist as the West when it comes to determining diplomatic relations.