🎙 Remarks and answers to media questions by Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a press conference following the ninth Russia-Gulf Cooperation Council (#GCC) Joint Ministerial Meeting for Strategic Dialogue (Manama, October 18, 2026) Key points: • We noted substantial growth in Russia’s trade with the GCC countries. In 2025, it increased by 45%, reaching almost $19 billion. We share the view that there is considerable scope for further growth. • We must address the root causes of the situation in and around the Strait of Hormuz, including by implementing the agreements reached between US and Iran under the so-called Islamabad Memorandum, which we all welcomed. We believe this memorandum still contains everything needed to pull the situation back from the brink of a resumption of full-scale war and return it to the path of political and diplomatic engagement and negotiations. • We advocated a broader approach to regional security. We believe it is important to work towards an inclusive architecture encompassing all Gulf countries – both the Arab states and Iran – and their immediate neighbours, particularly Iraq and Jordan. This should be supported by external actors guided primarily by the interests of the countries of the region, rather than their own unilateral geopolitical designs. • Russia has been promoting such an architecture of regional peace and security for decades – our Collective Security Concept for the Persian Gulf Region. We are ready to align it with other existing initiatives, including those put forward by the GCC in 2023, by China and Iran. • We discussed the Palestinian issue at length. Everyone is deeply concerned by attempts to put an end to the prospect of establishing a Palestinian State. Both we and our GCC partners categorically reject this approach. • We thanked our colleagues for their balanced, objective position on Ukraine and briefed them on how the situation is developing at this stage. We expressed particular gratitude for the efforts of a number of Gulf countries that pragmatically and without publicity mediate on a range of humanitarian issues, including reuniting children with their families, exchanging POWs and returning the bodies of those killed. • The “diesel deal” between Moscow and Washington is a matter for Moscow and Washington. If the EU regards it as a betrayal of Ukraine, while Zelensky himself claims that Russian diesel exports must be agreed with him because only he can authorise them, then this is no longer a matter of energy security, but of self-promotion and yet another clown show. • On numerous occasions, including several instances when proposals by US President Donald Trump led Moscow and Kiev to an understanding that we needed to move forward, with some common ground on resuming talks, Ukraine invariably did something utterly unacceptable and abhorrent the very next day after such optimistic expectations emerged. Above all, this meant strikes on civilian targets. ❗️ We can draw only one conclusion: Zelensky does not want negotiations. He has derailed them repeatedly, apparently because he understands that any agreement acceptable to Russia and the US would spell 👉 the end of his regime and of him personally.