By Vestnik Kavkaza
Speaking about threats to Russian security, experts usually name a one-sided force approach in international relations; contradictions between main participants of the world politics; proliferation of mass destruction armaments and its belonging to terrorists; and evolution of criminal activity in the sphere of information technologies. One of serious threats to Russia can be withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan next year and the situation in Central Asia in general.
The head of the analysis center of the Institute of International Studies of MGIMO, Andrey Kazantsev, sees key problems in drug trafficking, uncontrolled migration from Central Asia to Russia and extremism.
“According to the Federal Agency for Narcotics Control, up to 40 thousand young Russian citizens die of heroin annually. The losses are similar to losses of Russia in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Moreover, the threat is clearly connected with other risks,” Kazantsev says.
“As for extremism, we relaxed a bit, when the situation in the North Caucasus relatively normalized. However, today Moscow is turning into an international terrorist center, according to the FSB. For example, Tajik workers come; extremist structures sign them in here and send them to Afghanistan or Syria. It is a kind of a circular route. There is a connection between growing migration flows and terrorists. And they are connected with drugs trafficking. Narcotics production in Afghanistan is one of sources of financing terrorists in the whole world, including Russia,” Kazantsev thinks.
Sergey Mikheyev, Director General of the Institute of the Caspian Cooperation, complains about the American authorities. He told Vestnik Kavkaza: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a historic chance to establish absolutely new relations between the West and Russia. Russia did its best for this. We were 100% open. Actually we willingly gave everything which we had gained during recent three centuries, hoping that the world would be different. In the 20th century, confrontation with the Soviet Union was the main geopolitical problem for the West. We solved it for them. We made an incredible present to them. The Soviet Union was gone. What did we get for it? I think we got nothing. In fact the West didn’t use the historic chance to build absolutely new relations with Russia and acted as a small shopkeeper who took all which could find and said: “Let’s return to the relations of the Cold War.” I’m afraid the position is still typical for the West today.”
According to Mikheyev, the West continues perceiving Russia as a potential rival, despite all the developments of the 1990s: “The Americans play an important role here. I am absolutely sure that the Americans constantly stir up conflicting potential between Europe and Russia, because if Europe and Russia find a common language, the role of the Americans in Europe and Eurasia will reduce radically. Europe won’t need nuclear umbrella of the Americans. Euro-Atlantic integration, I mean NATO, won’t be so interesting for Europe. The political domination of the Americans won’t be so important for Europe, if it agrees with Moscow on a new structure of security, cooperation and so on. And in this case, the Americans use new countries of the former Soviet Union and some countries of the former socialist camp. Using its historic hurts, ambitions, mistrust and so on, they are building a new cordon. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, but, unfortunately, tension remains.”
Mikheyev thinks that backsets of the Cold War occur all the time: “For example, the banal situation over selling Russian gas to Europe. It was hysteria, when Gazprom tried to access internal distributional nets of the Western European companies. We were accused of occupation of Europe. It is ridiculous because even in Soviet times Europe bought gas from the Soviet Union, and nobody said that the Soviet Union occupied Europe somehow. Today the topic appeared again and people began to discuss that access of Gazprom to certain nets was a fact of occupation of Europe. It is nonsense and absurd. This is the situation of negative hostility.
Or the situation with the South Ossetian conflict in 2008, when all international information nets broadcasted false picture. When the Georgian side began shooting of Tskhinvali, all world mass media, first of all European and Western, reported that the Russians attacked Tbilisi. They told lie purposely, it was a planned informational act, one of the acts which constantly engender a mistrust of Russia.”
