Many in the West tend to blame Russia for the current crisis, for assertive behavior and growing global ambitions. They claim that the West has done its utmost to promote genuine partnership, but Moscow was reluctant to cooperate and should be punished for an independent policy in international affairs. A «hybrid warfare» – to use NATO terminology - has been used against Russia with the combination of economic sanctions, military pressure through NATO military build-up on the «eastern flank» and a rigorous, demonizing anti-Russian propaganda.
This simplistic, ideologically driven approach – «who is not with us is against us» - ignores the fact that the history of the Russian foreign policy after the Cold War is the history of tremendous efforts to build a collective security system that would protect all members of the Euro-Atlantic region. Russia made a crucial contribution to the elimination of the legacy of the confrontation era by committing to withdraw troops and armaments from Germany, Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries. After joining the Council of Europe in 1996 we invested a lot in this organization with a view to create a single legal space in Europe. We developed cooperation with NATO and the EU based on the principles of respect and equality. In 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed laying down the basis for partnership and commitment to military restraint between former adversaries. Much was done to develop new instruments of arms control and confidence building, inter alia CFE regime, Vienna document, Open Sky Treaty, with a view to provide greater security with less means. In 2008, we proposed to jointly work on a European Security Treaty which was aimed at building a common space of security in the Euro-Atlantic area for all states regardless of their membership in military and political alliances.
The leading trend has always been to build partnerships, to capitalize on our relations with the West in such a way that would allow us to move forward on hard security, to build common security projects without dividing lines and to equate our political dialogue with the growing interdependence in the economic, humanitarian, cultural areas that we have accumulated over the years. Russia became the third EU largest trade partner after the US and China.
However, the emerging security order was broken by the euphoria in the West which claimed victory in the Cold War. NATO and the EU were identified as the only credible instruments for ensuring the Euro-Atlantic security, their vision could not be questioned. The OSCE was downgraded. To guarantee its «raison d’être» NATO has launched its open door policy which was recognized by many prominent politicians as one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes of the 20th century, because it creates further dividing lines on the continent and fosters psychology of confrontation.
We offered NATO to jointly develop a concept and architecture of the European BMD that would be jointly controlled, adequate to potential threats and would not undermine strategic stability. However, the US and its NATO partners did not agree to these proposals under a false pretext that Russia is not an ally and continued to develop its missile defense even regardless of the Iranian nuclear deal.
If we are really interested in promoting a collective security system in the Euro-Atlantic area, we have to accomplish two major tasks. First, is to overcome the legacy of the Cold War. We thought that this task belonged to the past. But with the Ukraine crisis we saw those Cold War instincts fomented with NATO making a sharp U-turn in its relations with Russia, choosing for deterrence and reorienting its military planning to counter non-existent «threats» from the East. This is a dangerous tendency which has an overall negative impact on the European security. Second, the quality of security directly depends on the ability of states to cooperate above institutional and political «dividing lines» in the areas of common interests. It is an illusion that one can create isolated «islands of security», relying solely on the instruments of NATO, the EU or any other organization. Global challenges have no borders, we are all equally exposed to them and the answer should collective.
We saw good examples of a genuine international cooperation as we worked together on Iran’s nuclear deal or the removal of chemical weapons from Syria. Russia continues to play an active role in the Normandy format, in the efforts to stabilize the situation in the Middle East and the North Africa, Afghanistan. Russia is critical in issues related to strategic stability and non-proliferation. We are not interested in the confrontation or spiralling into a new Cold War. On the contrary we are convinced that there is no real alternative to mutually beneficial cooperation on the basis of equality, pragmatism and respect for the interests of each other