The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed hope at a recent meeting with his German colleague Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the Europeans would stop playing their ideological and geopolitical games, facing the awful threat of terrorism which showed up in Belgium and instead unite to prevent terrorist activities on our common continent. “Previously-existing channels of anti-terrorist cooperation between Russia and the EU, Russia and NATO have been completely frozen, due to the initiative of our Western partners,” Lavrov recalled, stressing that military conflicts, unstable areas, international terrorism, other modern challenges and threats dictated the need to unite the efforts of the international community.
Meanwhile, the majority of the Western media stated that the political class in Russia saw a reason for gloating delight in the Brussels terrorist attacks. Alexander Romanovich, the Deputy Chairman of the State Duma, says that this is not true: “Our conversations or our opinions about what is happening in Europe are not gloating. This is an attempt to assess the events that are now taking place in Europe, and as you rightly said, to see with which EU, with which Europe we are working, and how we should behave, and what our reactions to it should be. We know that terrorist attacks have occurred on various occasions, we can remember Spain and Ireland. But today the events which have happened in Paris and Brussels are the consequence of wrong policies, which can be called the security policy of minorities, which in recent years has been provided by the EU leadership. That trend towards multiculturalism leads to further segregation or confrontation, not between civilizations, but to confrontation between those who live well and those who live badly.”
Romanovich says that the migrants who have come to Europe over the last 20 years, as a rule live worse than the general population: “This, in my opinion, is the main problem. I think that with the further involvement of the largest possible number of workers, or so-called refugees, this opposition, this problem will be exacerbated, because those people who come will still remain outcasts, and they will live much worse than the general population. Unfortunately, it must be noted that manifestations of such acts of terrorism that took place are possible in the future. Taking into account the fact that, unfortunately, the intelligence services of the European countries, despite the efforts that were undertaken in recent years, cannot cope with the situation today, which is mainly in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, where there are pockets of terrorist threat. I think that we need to monitor closely the events that are taking place, using our experience in dealing with the terrorist threats, trying to share this experience with our European partners.”
