Good afternoon, dear colleagues, dear friends!

First of all, on behalf of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, I am very glad to welcome all the participants of the Second International Parliamentary Conference “Russia-Africa”.

This format becomes traditional. This indicates our mutual interest and the objectively growing level of cooperation between the Russian Federation and the states of the African continent.

It is important that our Conference is being held few months before the Russia-Africa Summit, which will be held in July in my hometown, St. Petersburg. This means that we, at the parliamentary level, will be able to formulate our proposals and ideas for the heads of states on issues of development of our relations, strengthening ties in political, economic, humanitarian areas and enhancing the role of parliaments.

Colleagues, we all understand that our time is marked by global, tectonic shifts in the world system. It can be said that the world is throwing off the remnants of the shackles of colonial dependence and moving towards real multipolarity, a more just world order. And it is hard, simply impossible to imagine new world without Africa. Russia not only fully supports this process, but our country is also one of its most active participants.

We have supported and still support principles of equality, mutual respect, inalienable right of each state to choose independently its own path of development, its own destiny without foreign interference. It is in this vein that we have been building cooperation with African states for many decades. Mutually beneficial and equal cooperation. We have always supported our African friends in word and deed in their difficult national liberation struggle against colonialism and illegal occupation. Our country, then the Soviet Union, has provided political, financial, economic, military technical assistance, support in the formation of independent states, built important infrastructure facilities, and provided training support. At the same time, I would especially like to emphasize that our country has never set any conditions, made any demands, while the Western countries have done exactly the opposite.

Courage and conviction in the rightness of their choice helped people of the continent achieve freedom and sovereignty. The role of African states is growing in the global economy. Africa is a continent with great potential that has yet to be fully revealed. This is a continent with population of almost one and a half billion people. A continent which over the past decades has made a huge leap in development, not only in economic, but also in social and scientific. The international prestige of the continent is also increasing.

I believe that this is a completely objective and natural trend that the countries of the collective West, guided by the United States of America, do not want to take into account. They are trying to maintain at any cost their primacy and the role of world hegemon, which has long been a thing of the past for objective historical reasons. They do not want to change their neocolonial mentality, using the well-known means of deterrence: sanctions, threats, blackmail, double standards and often barefaced hypocrisy. And they continue constantly to pay lip service to rejection of their colonial legacy, but in fact they are not ready to admit their guilt for the genocide of the peoples of Africa, the robbery and barbaric exploitation of the natural resources of African countries, for the committed crimes.

Thus, the problem of paying compensation for damage caused during the colonial period has not yet been resolved. A delegation of the Federation Council has just paid an official visit to the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria. And I can say that the issue of compensations to victims of French nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara is still unresolved and very acute for the Algerian people. And there are similar issues in many African countries.