Yesterday, in an interview with TV channel 'Russia-24', Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stated: "We have rather big defense expenditures. These costs are justified based on the current situation of our country, as well as the need to hold a reformation of our Armed Forces. These expenditure items are enough for the implementation of certain military tasks, like the one that is currently being implemented by the Russian military forces in Syria."
Explaining the need for the operation of the Russian army in Syria, Medvedev said: "We are protecting the Russian people from the threat of terrorism, because it is better to do it abroad, rather than fight terrorism inside the country."
The Deputy Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of the Council on International Relations under the Russian President, Vladimir Zorin, believes that the problems in the Middle East directly concern each of us: "This is not an abstraction. I remember that after the terrorist attack in Volgograd, our Patriarch Kirill wrote an article which stated that the fight against terrorism became a matter for all the people. Terrorism and countering it is an extraordinary problem of our time, which does not bypass the attention of politicians, diplomats, teachers and businessmen. Therefore, the main aim of combating terrorism and the formation of anti-terrorism consciousness is to create awareness of the anti-terrorist world in society, instilling in people an immunity to the attempts at involvement in terrorist activity, the reduction of the social base of support for terrorists and strong condemnation of the use of terrorist methods under any slogans or ideologies."
According to Zorin, the main target of the ideological attack is the youth: "The situation with a student of the Philosophy Faculty, I want to emphasize – a second year-student of the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University – says that we need to think seriously about countering the ideology of terrorism among young people and students. This trend should be subject not only to one-off conferences, round tables in the student audience, which are often conducted in a formal way, but, apparently, now we are talking about regular training courses."
Zorin proposed introducing the subject "study of terrorism and the fight against this phenomenon" in universities: "It would be appropriate to include it in the curriculum, and in the humanitarian faculties it must be on the list of specialties. This is done, by the way, in a number of universities in Israel, the US and Europe."
