Friday, March 29, 2024 - The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, has said Nigeria is still neutral in Russia and Ukraine's war despite condoling the Russian government over the terrorist attack in Moscow in which 140 people were killed.
Addressing newsmen in Abuja, Tuggar noted
that Nigeria has always had a good relationship with
Russia since the Soviet and Cold War eras. He said;
“Nigeria has been consistent in terms of
even when we had a bipolar world, we were non-aligned, we were neither with the
US nor the Soviet bloc at the time.
“We dealt with both sides. We are
equal opportunity aligners, we are aligned with the interests of Nigeria and we
will continue to do so.
“This is why we continue to emphasize today on strategic autonomy and that’s
the new name for non-alignment since we no longer have those two blocs, you no
longer have a bipolar world.
“With the structure that you have now, it is a multipolar world. We align with
whatever polarity benefits Nigeria. The tradition of condoling with countries
when they have such unfortunate incidents continues. It’s not new. And Russia
is not an enemy.
“Our position on violation of territorial
integrity of countries remains the same, it remains consistent, we condemned
the violation of Ukraine’s territorial space when it occurred but it does not
mean that because of that, we will stop dealing with Russia.
“We will continue to deal with Ukraine, the
same way we’re dealing with other countries and whenever something happens to
them, whenever there is any misfortune, we will commiserate with them, the same
way that they commiserate with us.”
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