Yesterday the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, stated that she was surprised and worried about the obvious helplessness of the EU in the context of refugee inflows from the Middle East and North Africa. “I believe everybody understands that the incredible crisis with refugees is a direct consequence of the absolutely irresponsible and thoughtless policy of changing political regimes in the region. Not everybody agrees with the view; some still say that these people are not refugees, but migrants. It is very interesting. They believe that the problem of refugees is not connected with the policy of Western countries in the Middle East. People who are fleeing to Europe are afraid of staying in their native countries which are stricken by armed conflicts and the anti-terrorist struggle, i.e. there countries are suffering socio-economic degradation,” Zakharova said.
Meanwhile, Yuri Nagernyak, Director General of the International Fund for Promotion of Culture, Science and Education ‘Humanism, Progress and the Rule of Law’, says that those refugees, who are now trying to settle in the Western Europe, are going there not because they love the Germans, the Swedes or the Dutch. “Regardless of whether they are committed to Islamic State (I think there are not many of them), they carry seeds of confrontation. And as the experience of multiculturalism shows, as the experience of previous decades in Europe shows, those who were met sincerely eventually carried a real threat of social confrontation and conflicts,” the expert says.
He believes that to locate hundreds of thousands of refugees in Western Europe against the background of the number of migrants who are already there, isn't the biggest problem: “The problem is that after all the people who come today, they are more radical, in any case, than those migrants who already live in Europe.”
Yuri Nagernyak says that for the post-Soviet space, the threat is relatively less, because refugees are still focused on Europe: “That is, we get those, I think, who could not get there on either ethnic or religious factors. For example, in the Middle and Near East there is a very large colony of Armenians, of course, they are quite comfortable going to Armenia. But for Western Europe it is a serious threat, which has not yet been fully assessed. It could lead to one of factors working for the collapse of a united Europe.”
