Russian foreign minister: NATO has not gotten rid of cold war mentality

NATO has not yet gotten rid of the cold war mentality, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday.

“The speed NATO switched to a tough confrontation, to absolutely unacceptable, unilateral, groundless accusations in our respect within the Ukrainian crisis has demonstrated that NATO has not yet gotten rid of cold war mentality,” Lavrov said in an interview with the Rossiya television channel.

“This is very sad, because we were building our relations after the Caucasian crisis,” Lavrov noted. “Back then we asked - since our peacekeepers were deployed there - to call an emergency meeting of the Russia-NATO Council. The Americans answered: ‘No, there will be no Russia-NATO Council, moreover, we are going to freeze the Council for what you are doing in response to Saakashvili’s actions.’
Later on, the West came to us and said: ‘You know, it was a mistake.’ Now they are repeating the same mistakes - despite the fact that they have not recalled their ambassador, they have closed all structures of practical cooperation.”

The cold war of today is not the same as it was years ago - it is now fought in the information space, according to the Russian foreign minister. “The classical cold war also involved the mass media, but it was a far cry from what can be done today, taking into account the internet and all its possibilities,” he noted.

At the same time, Lavrov said he thought that neither U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, nor German and French foreign ministers were content with such state of things. “But they cannot deviate from their position that Russia is to blame for everything,” Lavrov said. “This is what happened three and a half years ago, when the Syrian crisis was beginning, presidents of the United States and France said any contacts with Assad were out of question. I am sure they now regret it because they must have thought everything would happen as quickly as it was in Egypt, in Libya, but things proved to be different in Syria.”

“So, as they say ‘a word spoken is past recalling,’ it once again demonstrates that it is not right to jump at conclusions,” he stressed.
[itar-tass.com] 
29/9/14
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