The United States leads the way in limiting Russia’s opportunities and does everything to prevent the potential for alliance between Russia and the EU, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “One gets the impression that Russia came under fire for most actively expressing an independent point of view in the world today, finding an independent policy its natural right. Naturally this line does not fit together with anyone’s claims for being exceptional,” Lavrov said.
“The course of restricting Russia’s opportunities is led not by European nations but primarily the US. Many analysts in Russia, the European Union and even the United States itself are stressing that Americans are trying to prevent the unification of the potentials of Russia and the EU guided primarily by the objective of keeping its own global leadership,” Lavrov said at a Wednesday session of the Russian Council for Foreign Affairs, Interfax reports.
“If you look at the course of events from this point of view, it turns out that the Eastern partnership program of the European Union that had been initiated by EU members extremely loyal to the US was used as a means for forming a kind of a new sanitary cordon between the EU and our country. To put it differently to resist the strategic interests of both Russia and the whole of the European Union to jointly look for new sources of development,” Lavrov said.
In recent times it has become especially apparent that “the choice has been made for the benefit of intensifying action to throw Russia back – more consciously by the US and on the part of the EU largely out of solidarity with American partners and in the hope that Russia will have to swallow another onslaught on its interests,” he said.
“This choice was made long before the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine. Suffice it to recall such landmarks of the anti-Russian spiral as the Magnitsky List, the accusations of supporting first Iran and then Syria. And the very fact of preparing and conducting the Olympic Games in Sochi became a pretext for whipping up anti-Russian propaganda in proportions having nothing to do with common sense or decency,” Lavrov said.
The events in Ukraine are not a manifestation of new trends but a culmination of the anti-Russian course pursued by western countries, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
“What happened in Ukraine was not a manifestation of fundamentally new trends but rather a culmination of the course which has for years been pursued by western partners with respect to Russia,” Lavrov said.
“Actually, the habit of not seeing Russians as one of their own has been present in Western Europe for centuries. And that is despite the fact that over at least the past three centuries we have been an integral part of European culture and politics, and it is the periods of Russia’s most active involvement in common European affairs that were characterized by stability and quiet on the continent. We would not like now to delve into the reflections as to why attempts to reach genuine partnership in Europe have failed: obviously, differences in worldviews, historical experience, traditions, and finally, the sheer vastness of our country size have played a part,” the minister said.
“Recently, there has been an increasingly evident contradiction between multipolarity that is clearly getting stronger, and the desire of the US and the historical West to hold on to their usual domineering positions; between the cultural-civilization diversity of the present-day world and the attempts to force on everyone the Western scale of values, which, incidentally, is getting ever more detached from its own Christian roots and, therefore, less and less susceptible to the religious feelings of the people of other faiths. Another factor is the desire of western elites to demonstrate that the trend which has been registered throughout recent period towards reduction of the Western relative weight in the global balance of forces is not irreversible,” the minister said.
The West is doing everything to control as much space near the Russian borders as possible, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov believes.
“During the past quarter of a century with our Euro-Atlantic partners we spoke of developing strategic relations, set up joint structures meant to promote that, adopted political declarations with calls to form a common space of peace, security and stability. And simultaneously Western partners promoted its own agenda ignoring the interests of Russia, enlarged NATO and generally ran things to bring the geopolitical space they control to the very Russian borders,” Lavrov said at a session of the Russian Council for International Affairs.
“The West finds it ever easier to assume an accusing stance with regard to Russia,” he said.
“When we advocate basic principles of international law, reject unlawful interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states we are accused of excessive conservatism, of being obsessed with the status quo and disregarding changes taking place in the world. But when we support the free will of the people of Crimea in full compliance with its right to self-determination we are being called a revenge-seeking power trying to bring geopolitical rivalry back to international relations. In reality geopolitics never disappeared. There was simply an attempt to pretend that it was a prerogative of only a group of chosen countries capable of changing the situation around the world according to its own patterns,” Lavrov said.
