Voice of Russia
March 6, 2014
One of Ukraine coup goals was accession to NATO – Russian MP
The chairman of the Russian State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, Alexei Pushkov, believes that a key goal of the “pseudo-revolution” that was staged in Ukraine was to promote the country’s accession to NATO.
Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, earlier registered a bill that amends several national security laws and proposes abandoning the country’s non-bloc policy and proclaiming its course toward accession to NATO.
“This bill does not surprise me at all. This was their goal. The crowd on the Maidan was shot at for the sake of this. Snipers hired by the opposition killed protesters for the sake of this. This was a key goal of this entire pseudo-revolution, which, in effect, was nothing other than a rather messy seizure of power,” Pushkov said on Wednesday, when commenting on the document.
The proposed bill amends Ukraine’s laws on national security and domestic and foreign policy, proclaiming integration into Euro-Atlantic organizations and accession to NATO as a strategy of Ukraine’s foreign policy.
The Ukrainian parliament said on its website that this bill had been submitted by Batkivshchyna faction MPs Borys Tarasyuk, Valentiyn Korolyuk and Aleksandr Chornovolenko on Tuesday.
An explanatory note to the document says that “the 2010 declaration of Ukraine as a non-bloc state failed to help strengthen Ukraine’s security, but, instead, weakened the defense potential and the level of national security of Ukraine.”
These parliamentarians are convinced that “the adoption of this bill will help bolster cooperation between Ukraine and NATO and will allow Ukraine to further enhance its national security.”
Moscow disappointed with results of Russian-NATO Council meeting
The Russian side is disappointed with the results of the Russia-NATO Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine, Alexander Grushko, Russia’s Permanent Representative at NATO, said on Wednesday after an ambassadorial meeting of the Russia-NATO Council.
“We are disappointed with the results of this meeting,” he said. “Russia had expected it would feature a discussion where it we would be able to clarify our approaches to the settlement of the situation in Ukraine. But at the very beginning of the meeting, the NATO secretary general announced that the NATO Council had preferred not to wait till our today’s meeting and had passed a decision to suspend cooperation in certain areas.”
Such an approach, according to the Russian NATO ambassador, ran counter to all basic documents of the Russian-NATO Council, the Rome declaration and the Lisbon document “that state that before taking any decisions, Russia and the NATO countries would discuss problems, begin dialogue and try to agree a common position.”
“Today’s meeting was another evidence that NATO operates double standards and uses the Cold War stereotypes in respect of Russia,” Grushko noted. This is what we have been speaking against for years. We want to transform the structure of relations between Russia and NATO not in the format ‘one against twenty-eight’ or ‘one plus twenty-eight’ but as a pool of states that use the platform of the Russian-NATO Council to clarify their national approaches.”
“The meeting was just the reading out national statements,” he said, adding that the Russian side was sorry that there had been no in-depth dialogue. “At the same time, I would like to note that we could not help being surprised at persistent attempts to picture the situation as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which is not existent and cannot exist whatsoever.”
“All security threats, if any, stem entirely from the catastrophic domestic situation in Ukraine, which, to a greater extent, developed that way because many Western countries had exerted open pressure on public opinion in Ukraine urging it to draw “the right conclusions,” he stressed. “We see the way to solve the current problems in restoring the rule of law. The basis should be the February 21 agreement attested by foreign ministers of three NATO countries. This agreement provided for the formation of a representative government that must take into account the interests of all political forces and regions of the country, the launch of a constitutional reform and subsequent presidential elections. Naturally, the constitutional reform must also take due account of interests of all minorities and regions. This is we think to be a way out of this situation.
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