According to the VCIOM public opinion poll, 1 in 5 Russian citizens are sure that too much attention is paid to foreign policy today. On the contrary, 7 percent of responders believe that the country’s leadership doesn’t pay significant attention to it. The most popular view is that the level of attention paid to foreign policy is sufficient. The majority of Russians think that Moscow has more successes than failures in the foreign policy sphere. As for worsening Russian-US relations, 13 percent of Russian citizens have a positive attitude to the US, 34 percent have a negative attitude; the majority of respondents, primarily the youth, do not care about US policy at all.
Alexander Rahr, a German political scientist, doesn’t share the view of the majority of Russian citizens. He thinks the situation in the world indicates an approaching storm: “This is the first time that I am worried about peace in Europe, and this is not a joke. From the German and the French side, there are attempts to conduct conversations with Russia and with China. However, NATO has a faction consisting of some of the Central European and Eastern European countries, particularly Poland, which has a different position. At the Munich Security Conference, the Polish president said that he did not want to talk about Syria and wanted to talk about the conflict in Ukraine. And if everything depended on him, he would have started to supply and support Ukraine with weapons, so that it was possible to fight the pro-Russian rebels in the east of Ukraine. From my point of view, this is extremely dangerous.”
Rahr believes that some European countries feel that they are at war with Russia, while the US wants to maintain control over a unipolar world: “America does not want to agree with Russia's status. But what can America do to prevent such a course of events? The US presidential candidates are using a sharp anti-Russian tone during the election campaign. The role of the NATO Secretary General provokes great uncertainty in me. At the Munich Security Conference, German MP Alexander Noy posed a good question to him: "What is the situation with missile defense? After all, it was directed against Iran. Now that Iran is doing what the West wants, it has closed its nuclear program, will we continue to build a missile defense system in Europe?" And Stoltenberg replied to this very cynically: "Russia is the new enemy, and we will build the missile defense system."
The political scientist wonders: “Where did this come from? Why is the NATO-Russia Council, where we could discuss it, not working? Over the last 20 years, they said that NATO was not an enemy of Russia, that it was ensuring the security of Europe, the danger did not come from NATO. However, the conflict between Russia and Turkey is a serious threat. A war in the third world may transform very quickly. If Russia had not come to Syria, NATO would do what it has already done in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and eventually in Ukraine by overthrowing Yanukovich. They would not come to terms with Assad.”
