Korybko To Pakistan’s Dawn Newspaper: Please Correct Your Inaccurate Quotation Of Lavrov

By omitting Lavrov’s crucial clarification that his criticism of the Quad was solely directed at outside players’ attempt to militarize that officially economically driven group and leaving out his reference to his “American colleagues’” efforts to exploit its relationship with ASEAN for joint anti-Russian purposes, Dawn left their readers with the false impression that Russia’s top diplomat was implying that India is part of these two plots, thus suggesting that bilateral ties have recently become troubled.

Dawn is one of Pakistan’s top newspapers, which is why it’s imperative that its editors correct its inaccurate quotation of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in one of their latest reports published on Saturday. In their piece about how “Russia features in anti-China Quad statement in India”, Dawn misleadingly wrote the following:

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticised the Quad for ‘playing one country against another’. He also slammed the Quad proposal for Asean cooperation, which he said was an attempt to cut Russia and China out of the East Asia summits.”

That’s not exactly what Russia’s top diplomat said during his participation in the latest Raisina Dialogue, which is India’s premier annual conference on International Relations. Here’s the full excerpt of relevance as taken from the transcript of his remarks shared by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official website:

“We never engage in playing any country against any other country. Unfortunately, this approach is being tried by some other outside players in the context of so-called Indo-Pacific strategies, in the context of AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States,) and in the context of using the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) not for economic purposes, but trying to militarise it. The idea promoted by our American colleagues, ASEAN plus Quad, is openly aimed at ruining the East Asia Summit. In other words, it would be the East Asia Summit minus China and minus Russia.”

By omitting Lavrov’s crucial clarification that his criticism of the Quad was solely directed at outside players’ attempt to militarize that officially economically driven group and leaving out his reference to his “American colleagues’” efforts to exploit its relationship with ASEAN for joint anti-Russian purposes, Dawn left their readers with the false impression that Russia’s top diplomat was implying that India is part of these two plots, thus suggesting that bilateral ties have recently become troubled.

Readers should be aware that Lavrov earlier said the following about Russian-Indian relations in the same answer where he later criticized the US’ attempted weaponization of the Quad:

“We never make friends against somebody. Russia has excellent relations with China and excellent relations with India. The official documents signed by the two leaders characterise relations with India as an especially privileged strategic partnership. I do not know whether any other country has the same status with our Indian friends on paper, officially, but this is what we believe is reflecting the reality, be it the economy, be it technology, be it military cooperation, military-technical cooperation, culture, humanitarian ties, educational ties.”

Considering this context, the conclusion can be made that Dawn’s unnamed correspondent who inaccurately quoted Lavrov did so deliberately and not due to any supposedly innocent mistake.

After all, the aforementioned individual would have had to scroll past the Foreign Minister’s extremely positive assessment of Russian-Indian relations in order to get to the part where he criticized the US’ attempted weaponization of the Quad, so it therefore follows that they purposely left the first part out of their report and subsequently twisted his words regarding the latter. This insight therefore means that Dawn’s report can objectively be described as disinformation.

The purpose appears to be misleading their targeted audience about the true state of Russian-Indian relations by relying on the deliberate omission of Lavrov’s assessment of the aforesaid and malicious twisting of his criticism of the US’ attempted weaponization of the Quad against his country. This disinformation provocation is extremely short-sighted though since manipulating average Pakistanis’ perceptions of those two’s ties doesn’t change anything about either of their policies.

Not only that, but it ended up discrediting Dawn, one of their country’s top newspapers. Observers can only speculate about whether their editors were aware ahead of time of the disinformation provocation that their unnamed correspondent just carried out, but hopefully they’ll come across this fact-check and promptly take action. In particular, they should correct that individual’s inaccurate quotation of Lavrov and seriously consider some form of professional punishment against them for what they did.