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Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov.
Marrakech – Morocco’s top diplomat moved this week to lock in Russian support at the Security Council, where a US-drafted resolution would end MINURSO’s peacekeeping role on April 30, 2027, and close out the mission in Morocco’s Western Sahara as a political body by October 31, 2027.
Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita held a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, on Friday, a call placed “at the initiative of the Moroccan Side,” according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The two ministers reviewed “priority tasks for the continued steady development of Russia-Morocco relations,” along with preparations for the Third Russia-Africa Summit. They also took up current regional issues “in the context of maintaining bilateral foreign policy coordination, including at the UN.”
The timing carries weight. Rabat wants to confirm that Moscow will not oppose the new American text, which reinforces the Autonomy Plan as the only solution to the dispute and could rename the UN mission, stripping every reference to a “referendum” from its mandate and title.
Russia abstained on Resolution 2797. As one of the five permanent members of the Security Council (P5) – alongside the US, Britain, France, and China – it holds a veto, meaning a single “no” can sink any resolution.
That power makes Moscow’s position on the new draft decisive, and it explains why Rabat moved to test the waters before the text reaches a vote.
The zero draft, dated October 20, turns that direction into binding language. It decides that the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, MINURSO, “shall be renamed the United Nations Mission for Western Sahara (MINUSO),” removing the referendum from the mission’s very name. It affirms that “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the only feasible solution.”
The text also sets a clear exit for peacekeeping. The mandate “shall terminate on April 30, 2027,” after which the mission continues as a special political mission until October 31, 2027.
The draft directs a phased drawdown of uniformed personnel, with a cut of “no less than 50 per cent” by January 31, 2027, and asks the Secretary-General to detail the new structure by December 15.
It builds on three rounds of direct talks held in Washington and Madrid between Morocco, the Polisario Front, Algeria, and Mauritania, all taking Morocco’s Autonomy Plan as their basis. The draft condemns the May 5 attack on Es-Smara and requests UNHCR to register the Tindouf camp population within six months.
Morocco’s envoy to the UN, Omar Hilale, framed the shift before the Fourth Committee on October 13. Resolution 2797 moved the UN “from the logic of managing the Sahara question to that of settling it,” he argued, calling it an “irreversible turning point.” For the first time, he noted, the text placed autonomy “within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.”
Hilale left no room on the referendum. The Security Council “buried any idea of a referendum a quarter-century ago,” he reminded the committee, adding that the Fourth Committee’s own resolutions have made no mention of it for two decades.
He then turned to the human stakes in Tindouf, which he described as the world’s second-longest refugee crisis. “Behind each resolution there are women, men and young people waiting in the Tindouf camps,” Hilale told delegates, pressing for durable solutions under international law: voluntary repatriation, resettlement in a third country, or integration in the host country.
Any delay or conditionality, the Moroccan ambassador warned, would be “legally unlawful, politically immoral, and condemnable in humanitarian terms” – a closing line aimed squarely at those still invoking a vote the Council has long since abandoned.
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