MOSCOW, May 23 (RIA Novosti) – The crisis in Ukraine and the fact that security issues in Europe have become the focus of international attention resulted from the Western deterrence of and refusal to cooperate with Russia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday.
Speaking at the Moscow International Security Conference, the minister said that its agenda included searching for resolutions of conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia.
"Unfortunately, in the last few months, this burning issue was overshadowed by the crisis in Ukraine. In other words, the European continent, which gave rise to two global military disasters in the last century, draws all international attention instead of demonstrating to the world an example of peaceful development and wide cooperation," he said.
Such a worrisome state of affairs is not an accident, but a logical result of European events in the past 25 years, he added.
"What I primarily mean is that our Western partners favored the conventional logic of moving their geopolitical space east, instead of using a historical chance to build a large borderless Europe. Essentially, this meant continuing a softly 'wrapped' line of the deterrence of Russia," Lavrov said.
The participants of the third International Security Conference in Moscow include defense ministers of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member countries, as well as representatives of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other countries.
The European Union, US and NATO representatives, critical of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and its reunification with Crimea in March, refused to participate.
Ukraine went through a regime change resembling a military coup on February 22. The country’s parliament ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, changed the constitution and scheduled early presidential elections for May 25.
Since March, anti-government protests have been spreading across the mainly Russian-speaking southeastern regions of the Ukraine. Ukraine’s new interim authorities, backed by radical ultranationalist groups, launched a special operation to crack down on the protesters in mid-April, which has already led to dozens of deaths and injuries.
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