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2024-12-08 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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'Everything's in the trash.' Lavrov found reasons for the reincarnation of the Cold War
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
He ain't wrong...
by Evgeniya Kondakova
[REGNUM] On December 5–6, the OSCE Foreign Ministers' Council meeting was held in Malta. The event takes place every year, but this one was special for several reasons: this was the first visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to the EU in three years (since the OSCE meeting in Stockholm in 2021), and for the first time since the meeting, representatives of the Russian Federation and Ukraine were present at the OSCE venue.
In 2022, Poland, as the country holding the presidency of the Organization, did not send an invitation to Russia, and in 2023, the Ukrainian delegation boycotted the meeting in North Macedonia due to Lavrov’s arrival.
However, this time it was not without scandal. On the eve of the event, Malta "due to circumstances beyond its control" cancelled the visa of the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, as it became known later, at the insistence of the Baltic countries.
The situation is certainly outrageous, as Lavrov said during the meeting in Valletta, but Maria Vladimirovna did not waste time and instead of going to Malta, she went to a concert in the Kremlin Palace, and then went to Yekaterinburg for the opening ceremony of the monument to Emperor Alexander I, who defeated Napoleon and liberated Europe. It turned out very symbolic.
"But she could have quietly sat on a chair in the OSCE Foreign Ministers' Council meeting room and sympathetically empathized with the comatose state of the Helsinki Final Act. But, as they say, you asked for it - let's recall today the glory of the heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812 and the beaten Napoleon," Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel.
The organizers seated the delegations in alphabetical order, but for some reason the USA and Germany were next to each other, allowing US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and German Minister Annalena Baerbock to while away the time by talking. The head of the State Department was separated from Lavrov by 14 seats, and from Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga by 2. According to journalists present in the room, he caught every gesture and glance of his American colleague, and pointedly did not look in the direction of the Russian minister, who was sitting 11 chairs away.
Russian diplomats went to the event expecting to openly discuss the accumulated problems and ways to solve them on fundamentally new terms, respecting the interests of all participating states. However, as before, Western countries used this platform for their own interests, which, in fact, led to the current institutional crisis of the OSCE.
As Maltese Foreign Minister Ian Borch was about to deliver his speech, there was a noise. It was just rain, the host reassured his colleagues, calling it a good omen. The same inclement weather had hit Malta on December 2–3, 1989, during the meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, which marked the end of the Cold War. Lavrov would later mention that historic event in his speech.
"Times have changed significantly, but our relations are once again defined by geopolitical rivalries, and relations between OSCE members are facing serious tests in the area of peace and security. This is our third meeting since the beginning of Russia's war against Ukraine, which poses a systemic threat to European security," Borc said.
Thus, he set the tone for further speeches. And so, the first of the OSCE member states to speak was Ukraine. In his speech, Sybiga asked the West for even more air defense systems and revealed Kiev's "peace plan": Russia should leave Ukraine, and then Ukraine would be accepted into NATO. However, these words of the head of the MFA clearly contradict what Volodymyr Zelensky said just a few days ago : Ukraine is ready to stop military actions along the front line, giving up claims to lost territories, in exchange for membership in the Alliance. There is a discrepancy.
A dozen ministers who spoke after Sybiga used roughly the same rhetoric, focusing on the Ukrainian theme instead of touching on issues of global security and the institutional crisis of the OSCE. What can we talk about if Borch, a representative of the country chairing the OSCE, did exactly the same thing?
Blinken, whose term ends in six weeks, was the most aggressive. The US secretary of state accused Russia of pursuing an “imperial project” based on the idea of “wiping Ukraine off the map” and of trying to destroy the founding principles of the OSCE, enshrined in the Helsinki Act of 1975.
Lavrov, when it was his turn, parried these accusations of his American colleague. But first the Ukrainian delegation could not resist a prank: Sibiga, and after him the heads of the Polish and Czech Foreign Ministries, demonstratively left the hall as soon as the Russian minister began his speech.
He noted that the Helsinki Act of 1975 put the principle of indivisibility of security at the forefront - no one strengthens their security at the expense of others, no country or organization claims dominance in Europe. However, there is a gulf between that Security Conference 49 years ago and today. Life has shown that for NATO and the EU, the Helsinki principles are "an empty piece of paper," the minister added. In 1999, the North Atlantic Alliance committed aggression against Yugoslavia, dismembering the state in the center of Europe, and now it has ignited the Ukrainian conflict to suppress Russia.
"The US and its allies have thrown all this on the scrap heap. The question is: for what purpose? The answer is obvious to us: to please the desire to return NATO to the political forefront. After the Afghan disgrace, a new "unifying enemy" was needed. The result is a reincarnation of the Cold War, only now with a much greater risk of it going into a "hot" phase," Lavrov warned.
Later, commenting on these words of the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic admitted that he was concerned about the further escalation of the conflict in Eastern Europe, and expressed hope that politicians would have enough common sense and wisdom to avoid this. Although some actors in Europe and the world are not ready for dialogue with each other to solve the accumulated problems.
Lavrov had to return to this topic when responding to criticism from his German colleague. Addressing the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Baerbock said: "You can deceive yourself in some ways, but you cannot deceive us - 1.3 billion people in Europe." However, she made a gross mistake: the population of Europe is almost half as much - about 745 million people. In the quote from the minister, published on the social network X, the German Foreign Ministry corrected the error, indicating that it was not about Europe, but about the OSCE area.
But the head of Russian diplomacy is always precise in his statements. Lavrov clearly explained who is responsible for the danger of transition to a "hot phase of conflict" today, much higher than in the East-West confrontation in the 20th century, and who is responsible for the new round of the Cold War: the West.
Later, at the final press conference, he stated that all Western international organizations without exception were aggressively, dishonestly, and resorting to outright lies, promoting the Ukrainian issue. The OSCE was no exception - the gala dinner was entirely dedicated to Ukraine, which is why the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry refused to attend.
The Ukrainization of the OSCE is especially sad, since the Organization was created on the principles of consensus, equality and the search for a balance of interests of states. And, continuing to apply them, today it could become, as Lavrov put it, one of the points of gathering the interests of all members of the European space.
"But it would never occur to anyone to use the OSCE for these purposes. To NATO and EU members - because their actions have pushed the OSCE "to the sidelines" of political processes, and to us and everyone else - because such an OSCE is meaningless. <…> The OSCE is a victim of the course of subordinating Europe to the United States with the help of Euro-Atlantic security concepts. There is not a single area left where the OSCE could play any useful role in finding answers to direct questions within its purview," the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
Western countries, which worry about human rights at any opportunity, maintain a deathly silence about the extermination of the Russian language in all spheres in Ukraine and the infringement of the rights of national minorities, the provocation in Bucha, the crimes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kursk region, and the undermining of the Nord Streams.
Despite the statement by OSCE Chairman Jan Borg about the need to interact with everyone, especially against the backdrop of raging conflicts, in reality the Organization is of little use now. It is sad that the OSCE leadership and those who manipulate it deliberately leave this organization outside the framework of creative work and the objective course of history, Lavrov stated.
But not so long ago, in the 1990s, former French President François Mitterrand called the OSCE a narrow but reliable bridge that allowed the participants in the Cold War not to fall into a hot war. It seems that since then the “bridge” has become quite dilapidated.
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Posted by badanov 2024-12-08 00:00||
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