Russian ambassador-at-large Ilya Rogachev has criticized what he described as the selective application of legal norms during a BRICS seminar
Published 16 Jun, 2026 20:18
Russian ambassador-at-large Ilya Rogachev. © Russian Embassy in South Africa / Mikhail Kosarev
The West routinely takes liberties with international law and applies double standards when dealing with countries representing the global majority, Russian ambassador-at-large Ilya Rogachev has said at a BRICS seminar on criminal law cooperation in Moscow.
Addressing the event on Tuesday, Rogachev argued that the West follows one set of legal norms in relations among its own states and another when dealing with countries outside its sphere.
“There is still international law, there is still law that so-called civilized nations living in a ‘blooming garden’ apply among themselves. And there are rules that are put in place on an ad-hoc basis when regulating relations between the inhabitants of the ‘blooming garden’ and the inhabitants of the ‘wild jungle’,” he said.
Rogachev questioned the legitimacy of such practices, asking: “Where are these rules set in writing? And who developed them?” He argued that the West frequently invokes unwritten standards and selectively interprets international law to advance its political objectives.
The garden analogy likely refers to an infamous remark made by former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in 2022. Addressing aspiring European diplomats, Borrell proclaimed that the bloc is a “garden” that has the best combination of “political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion” ever known to humankind – and must be protected from the outside “jungle.”
“The rest of the world… is not exactly a garden,” Borrell told students at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Following an outcry over apparent racist and colonial undertones, he had to walk back his remarks.
Another keynote speaker at the BRICS seminar in Moscow, former Russian Prime Minister Sergey Stepashin, who currently chairs the country’s Association of Lawyers, concurred that actions by Western countries over the past few decades have “dealt a serious blow” to the very concept of international law.
He cited among the most glaring examples the NATO-led 1999 war against Yugoslavia, when the US and its European allies launched their military campaign in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution.
“Not to mention Syria, Iraq, and what is currently going on in Lebanon. I’m not even talking about the annihilation of 70,000 civilians in Gaza by the regime of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Stepashin added.
He noted that no international organization, including the International Criminal Court, had spoken out against those responsible in the West.
