Belarus Accuses EU Of Defending Its 'Slipping Dominance' As Minsk Co-Launches A Eurasian Multipolarity Charter

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 13 Of 15

File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X

Belarus used the UN General Assembly to accuse the European Union of clinging to a "slipping dominance", a day after co-launching with Russia a Eurasian charter meant to anchor a multipolar order on the continent.

Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov addressed the General Debate on Saturday, September 26. Turning the session's theme on the organisation itself, he said the UN "does not work for the benefit of all" and "does not manage change", blaming states he accused of deliberately undermining the system of international relations.

He singled out the EU. Belarus, he said, was "concerned by the policies of the European Union's leadership", whose aim he described as preserving its "slipping dominance". He questioned whether Europeans wanted to become "cannon fodder" in a future war with Russia, and accused officials in Brussels of wanting to "play soldier".

Ryzhenkov also turned to history. "The West is already beginning to be held accountable for centuries of colonial plunder, the destruction of cultures, traditions, and the identities of enslaved peoples, and for the slave trade, which claimed millions of lives," he said. He noted that Belarus had supported the General Assembly resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans a crime against humanity, and backed the African Union's call for reparations, linking it to Belarus's own losses in the Second World War, when he said a third of its population was killed. Facing "unprecedented sanctions", he added, Belarus had "once again felt what it means to be a target".

The speech's multipolar case rested less on its rhetoric than on what Minsk had done the day before. On September 25, Ryzhenkov and Russia's Sergey Lavrov co-chaired a meeting on the sidelines of the Assembly that launched work on a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. Participants were Belarus, Vietnam, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Russia and Tajikistan.

Under the plan, Belarus will chair the negotiations and host a first in-person round of experts in Minsk before the end of 2026, with a leaders' text envisaged by around October 2027. The two governments argued that Eurasia, unlike Africa and Latin America, has many sub-regional organisations but no continent-wide umbrella structure. The idea builds on a "Joint Vision" document that Belarus and Russia completed in November 2024, setting out principles that include commitment to a multipolar world and a new Eurasian security architecture.

Speaking later the same day, Lavrov told the Assembly the initiative would help build "a new continent-wide architecture of peace and development".

Ryzhenkov's address was among the most confrontational of the session. It stood in contrast to Western governments such as Finland and Spain, which used the same debate to argue for reforming the existing system rather than replacing it.

The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading, but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.