Many in the West tend to blame Russia for the current crisis, for its assertive behaviour and growing global ambitions. They claim that the West has done its utmost to promote genuine partnership, but that Moscow has been reluctant to cooperate and should be punished for its independent policy in international affairs. “Hybrid warfare” – to use the NATO terminology – has been waged against Russia with a  combination of economic sanctions, military pressure through the NATO military build-up on the “eastern flank” and rigorous and demonising anti-Russian propaganda.

Russia’s efforts to build a common security
This simplistic, ideologically-driven approach – “anyone who is not with us is against us” – ignores the fact that the history of Russian foreign policy since the Cold War is the story 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 withdrawing 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 that organisation with a view to creating a single legal space in Europe. We developed cooperation with NATO and the EU based on the principles of mutual respect and equality. In 1997, the signing of the Russia-NATO Founding Act laid the basis for partnership and a commitment to military restraint between former adversaries.
Much was done to develop new instruments of arms control and confidence building, inter alia the CFE regime, the Vienna Document and the Open Sky Treaty, with a view to providing greater security with less means. In 2008, we proposed to jointly work on a European Security Treaty aimed at building a common security space in the Euro-Atlantic area for all states, regardless of their membership of military and political alliances.
The leading trend has always been to build partnerships, to capitalise 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 and cultural areas that we have accumulated over the years. Russia became the EU’s third largest
trade partner after the US and China.

NATO’s geopolitical mistakes
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 Euro-Atlantic security: their vision could not be questioned. The OSCE was downgraded. To guarantee its raison d’être NATO launched its open door policy, deemed by many prominent politicians to be one of the biggest  geopolitical mistakes of the 20th century, because it creates further dividing lines on the continent and fosters a psychology of confrontation.
We offered to NATO to jointly develop a concept and architecture for European Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) that would be jointly controlled, adapted to the potential threats, and that would not undermine strategic stability. However, the US with its NATO partners did not agree to these proposals under the false pretext that Russia was not an ally, and continued to develop its missile defence, regardless even of the Iranian nuclear deal.

How can we act together?
If we are really interested in promoting a collective security system in the Euro-Atlantic area, we have to accomplish two major tasks.
• The 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, opting for deterrence and reorienting its military planning to counter non-existent “threats” from the East. This is a dangerous tendency that has an overall negative impact on European security.
• Secondly, the quality of security directly depends on the ability of states to cooperate over and 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 organisation. Global challenges have no borders, we are all equally exposed to them and the answer should be collective.

The Iranian nuclear deal and other examples of cooperation give hope
We saw good examples of a genuine international cooperation as we worked together on Iran’s nuclear deal or on the removal of chemical weapons from Syria. Russia continues to play an active role in the  Normandy format, in the efforts to stabilise the situation in the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan. Russia is critical for issues related to strategic stability and non-proliferation. We are not interested in confrontation or in 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 each other’s interests.