United Russia urged to actively look for friends abroad

On January 23, a meeting of the bureau of the Supreme Council of United Russia (ER) was held under the chairmanship of party leader Dmitry Medvedev, at which United Russia summed up the results of 2022 and outlined plans for 2023. In his opening speech, Mr. Medvedev thanked the party members for their active participation in the life of the country during the special military operation, separately mentioning the work of the party headquarters and the prompt adoption by the UR Duma faction of laws to counteract anti-Russian sanctions.

The main part of the EP chairman’s speech was devoted to the international situation. He said that according to the results of last year, it became completely clear “who is our friend, who is ours, and with whom we finally ended up on the other pole.” In this regard, Dmitry Medvedev called on his colleagues to more active inter-party interaction with the parties of “friendly” states, including, in particular, organizations such as ASEAN, BRICS and the African Union. “Our party must help people in the world understand that a special military operation has become a forced and last resort response to the preparation of aggression by the United States of America and its satellites,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that the world has come close to the threat of a third world war.

Noting that “the fight against an external enemy is now much more important for us than inter-party differences,” the politician suggested that United Russia think about how to help other “patriotic forces of our country” to build a dialogue with foreign partners ideologically close to them. As for those political forces that “are trying to take some other, anti-state position abroad,” they “in general should be eliminated from the political landscape,” Dmitry Medvedev said, concluding the public part of the event.

However, two well-informed interlocutors of Kommersant, close to the leadership of the United Russia, assure that the topic of combating anti-Russian forces was not discussed at the closed part of the bureau’s meeting and there are no plans to work it out at the legislative level. And one of the interlocutors described the words of the United Russia leader as a “metaphor”: “At the meeting, on the contrary, they talked about inter-party interaction with those parties that support the president’s policy.”

Andrey Vinokurov