MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. The terrorist attacks in Brussels confirm the validity of the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the anti-terrorist front, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday speaking in the Diplomatic Academy.
"International terrorism has come to the fore among the challenges of our time. The terrible terrorist attacks in Europe’s capital Brussels are another confirmation of the validity of the initiative put forward by the Russian president on forming a broad anti-terrorist front," he said.
"These issues remain in the center of our international contacts, including the meetings with the top diplomats of Germany and the US held earlier this week and the forthcoming meeting with my Italian counterpart due to take place today," Lavrov added.
West not ready for united anti-terrorist coalition
Chairman of Russian State Duma’s International Affairs Committee Alexey Pushkov has said that the West is not ready for a united anti-terrorist coalition.
"In such conditions, as I see it, we should be aware that our potential partners are not yet ready, unfortunately, to assess this idea. We will have to persuade them," Pushkov said at the lower parliament house session devoted to discussing the draft document calling for establishing a united international anti-terrorist coalition.
"This is not malevolence, this is statement of facts because NATO is not involved in fighting against terrorism," he noted.
"We do not see cooperation with Russia, we do not see any measures on the European continent. However, we see a lot of commotion around necessity to defend the Baltic States from Moscow though no one threatens the Baltic States," Pushkov went on.
"Unfortunately, the importance of establishing such anti-terrorist coalition of global scale, in full format, is not recognized in the West while they are our main potential partners in the fight against terrorism," he added. The lawmaker reminded how NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at the recent Munich Security Conference that there are two threats for Europe - one from the south and one from the east. "He meant the ‘threat’ from Russia. After that, he said that he will only talk about the threat from the east," Pushkov said.
He noted that such approach dominates now in NATO headquarters and many Western capitals - "to put in the first place the fictional, imaginary, non-existent threat and then fervently fight against this non-existent threat."
‘We see the results of such approach where the focus is on the wrong thing, where the society and all countries in the Western alliance are offered a fake - political struggle with Russia instead of joint fight against the real threat which has now emerged in front of the whole world, including the Western world," the parliamentarian said. "We saw the results in Brussels. What has NATO been doing recently? It was preparing for deploying new forces in Latvia, and NATO secretary general told us about it, and thinking about the possibility to deploy Very High Readiness Task Force in Poland. We see the result. While NATO was concerned with all of this, terrorists delivered a strike - at first at Paris, and later at Brussels," Pushkov concluded.