Lavrov hopes that relations with UK “will not worsen” after Liz Truss comes to power

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov assured Tuesday that he hopes Russia’s relations with the United Kingdom “will not worsen” once the new British Prime Minister Liz Truss takes the reins of the country.

“I think Liz Truss has a high priority: before finally formulating her attitude to Russia, which is patently negative, she will have to fix relations with her close neighbors,” the chief diplomat said in remarks during a press conference reported by TASS news agency.

Lavrov has warned that the new UK minister will have to decide on “who is the French president, Emmanuel Macron, a friend or an enemy,” alluding to Truss’s words about his counterpart in France last week, when he said he did not know whether he was a friend or an enemy of the UK.

“She (Truss) has her own principles, primarily, adherence to a hard line in defending the interests of the UK without any desire to take into account the position of others or to make any compromises,” Lavrov said.

“I do not think that this will help to maintain or strengthen that country’s position on the international stage, which has clearly been eroded after the Brexit. Now London has long been actively trying to compensate for this loss of identity and influence in the European Union by taking quite drastic measures, including aggressive actions in relation to the situation that has developed around Ukraine. We all know that,” he added.

For her part, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has argued that the election of Truss as British prime minister is a sign of the “crisis of their interpretation of democracy.” “Perhaps the problem lies in the crisis in British democracy, since this result has nothing to do with a direct election of the British,” she has defended.

Thus, Zakharova has stated that “the system of indirect elections dominates the Anglo-Saxon god.” “Sometimes one wonders if there are really no people in countries with large populations and long democratic traditions who can represent the country properly, professionally and intelligently,” she said. “Maybe it is simply the problem of the lack of direct elections and the crisis of their interpretation of democracy,” he concluded.

Truss became prime minister of the United Kingdom on Tuesday after meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral, where the monarch invited the new tenant of 10 Downing Street to accept the post, thus ending the transfer of power following the resignation of the now former prime minister Boris Johnson.