The President of the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs, Igor Ivanov, said that Russia is always open for international cooperation in fighting threats of terrorism. According to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, IS is a threat to the entire international community.
According to Ivanov, “some details of the IS plans are still unknown today, but they undoubtedly can be a threat to international stability and some individual states. And Russia is no exception. Everything that happens near the Russian border can potentially or directly cause a great threat to our national security.”
Igor Ivanov thinks that we can fight it in different ways: “On the one hand, it is the responsibility of every state to strengthen its own security. Today Russia, headed by President Putin, is trying to do this. On the other hand, we should strengthen cooperation with those countries, which approve of our point of view. And in particular with Afghanistan, China, India and other states from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Of course, it is in our common interest to cooperate with Western countries, which have disagreements with us on certain matters. These are the United States and the European Union. We have always been ready for this cooperation.”
According to the politician, many times Russia has made goodwill gestures toward Western countries: “In particular in transit, military transit for cooperation of Western forces in Afghanistan. Russia decided to take a unilateral decision. It was an unprecedented decision. The main aim of it was to demonstrate that we are open for cooperation in order to fight the common threat. We have announced many times that modern security threats and challenges have a transnational and cross-border nature - terrorism, extremism, drugs, the threat of the spread of weapons of mass destruction and others.”
Igor Ivanov believe that one cannot fight these threats alone: “The US will not be able to cope with them. As for Europe, we can see everything. Though the drugs are made in Afghanistan, the consumers are not the Afghan people, various countries are the consumers, which are about ten thousand kilometers from Afghanistan. We can have some different opinions on the situation around the Ukrainian crisis. But it should not prevent our cooperation in other regions, where we have mutual interests. From my point of view, Russia didn't refuse to participate in a number of very useful programs in the context of the Russia-NATO Council. Moreover, Russia hasn't frozen the activity of NATO-Russia Council, which was created in 2002 in order to have one more platform for a dialogue in order to discuss issues. When there is no problem, we have nothing to discuss. When there is a problem, it is necessary to say, we must seek joint solutions. All these mechanisms were created for these purposes. And if none of these mechanisms work, what's the point of these mechanisms?”
