Interfax
March 6, 2014
Recent meeting on Ukraine exposes NATO’s double-standards policy – Russian envoy
BRUSSELS: The Russian Permanent Representative to NATO, Alexander Grushko, has said that Moscow’s delegation found the outcome of a Russia-NATO Council meeting on Ukraine, held in Brussels on Wednesday, frustrating.
“Today’s session once again confirmed that NATO has been pursuing a policy of double standards and has been applying Cold War stereotypes to Russia,” Grushko said after the session.
Russia had expected to “hold a discussion, in the course of which we would have been able to outline our approaches toward a settlement of Ukraine’s situation,” he said.
“However, the NATO secretary general announced at the very beginning of the session that the NATO Council, without waiting for our meeting today, had made a decision to suspend cooperation in certain areas,” the envoy said.
“Such an approach contradicts all of the fundamental documents of the Russia-NATO Council, the Rome declaration and the Lisbon document, which stipulate that before adopting any decisions, Russia and NATO countries should discuss these problems, engage in a dialogue and attempt to secure a common position on them,” Grushko said.
For many years, Moscow has been pushing for efforts to “transform the “1 against 28″ structure of Russia-NATO relations into a “1+28″ group of states that would use the platform of the Russia-NATO Council to articulate their national views,” Grushko said.
In effect, Wednesday’s session of the Russia-NATO Council was nothing other then “a pronouncement of national statements,” he said.
The Russian delegation “could not help but be perplexed by the fact that persistent attempts were made to portray this situation as a certain conflict between Russia and Ukraine that does not and cannot exist and will never exist,” he said.
“All threats to security, if they really exist, stem exclusively from the catastrophic internal situation in Ukraine that was largely caused by many Western countries’ barely disguised efforts to exert pressure on public opinion in Ukraine, demanding that the “right conclusions” be drawn. And we witnessed this outrageous act of interference in domestic affairs when a string of political figures addressed the Maidan and insisted that Ukraine come to “the right conclusion”, in other words make its choice in favor of Europe, ignoring the decisions adopted by the legitimate authorities,” the Russian diplomat said.
Russia believes that today’s problems can be resolved “only through restoring the rule of law based on the February 21 agreement, which was verified by the foreign ministers of three NATO countries,” Grushko said.
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