Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that Western efforts to “isolate” his country had completely failed and that Moscow was building stronger relations with countries in Africa, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere, Reuters reported.

“Today we can state that the West’s plans to isolate Russia by surrounding us with a blockade have failed,” Lavrov told Russian diplomats at an event at his ministry after returning from a nearly week-long tour of Africa.

“Despite the anti-Russian bacchanalia organized by Washington, London and Brussels, we are strengthening good neighborly relations in the broadest sense of the term with the international majority,” he said.

The veteran foreign minister’s latest trip took him to Mali, Mauritania and Sudan, as well as Iraq. He also recently visited South Africa, Eswatini, Angola and Eritrea.

Russia’s relations with the West, already strained for years, reached a new post-Cold War low after it invaded Ukraine nearly a year ago in what it called a “special military operation” that it said was necessary to strengthen their own security.

Kyiv’s Western allies called the move an imperial-style land grab and imposed broad economic sanctions on Russia, prompting it to seek closer ties with China, India, Arab and African countries and others that have refrained from joining the sanctions, calling for peaceful negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

Moscow says NATO has effectively become a party to the fighting in Ukraine by agreeing to provide Kiev with large amounts of military aid, including battle tanks, and accuses the United States of threatening global stability elsewhere in the world.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday that Russia would closely monitor any move by the United States to deploy hypersonic weapons in Japan, saying it would mean “a qualitative change in the regional security situation” for us.

She appeared to be responding to a report in Japan’s Sankei newspaper that said Washington could deploy long-range hypersonic weapons and Tomahawks to Japan amid rising tensions with China.