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Russia to present its outlook at European security model at OSCE summit

Moscow will present a report on a number of security questions, including NATO and Ukraine, at the OSCE's annual security conference

VIENNA, June 28. /TASS/. An annual security review conference begins on Tuesday at the headquarters of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Leading the Russian delegation is Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov.

Russia’s permanent representative to the OSCE, Alexander Lukashevich, told TASS Moscow is going to present its own outlook at the entire spectrum of relations in the sphere of security from the NATO sprawl to peace settlement of the armed conflict in Ukraine.

Alexei Meshkov is to take the floor at the session in the first half of the day on Tuesday.

The military and political bloc

"The conference has been specially defined as the main forum for reviewing the full spectrum of security problems along three dimensions of the OSCE," Lukashevich said. "Quite naturally, the military and political dimension comes first and it certainly embraces international terrorism, drugs trafficking and trading in people, among other things."

He indicated the Russian delegation’s plans to point out the concerns Moscow has developed in the wake of NATO’s activity in its eastern flank near the Russian borders.

"This undermines gravely the foundation of European security," Lukashevich said. "OSCE can’t stand aside and evade discussions of the problem."

Reports and speeches the Russian representatives are going to make will also take up the problem of the range of threats the OSCE as a pan-European organization should deal with, including the cross border and multinational threats coming out of Afghanistan and some other countries adjoining it.

"That’s also the problem of borders," Lukashevich said. "Apparently it’s an international or even a global problem linked to the migration crisis in Europe."

The conflict cycle

A separate three-day conference will be devoted to conflict situations in the space encompassed by the OSCE. Apart from Ukraine, which will be the focal point of a separate session, the OSCE singles out the mostly Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan and Moldova’s much-troubled independence-minded region of Transdniestria.

"There’s nothing to boast of as regards these problems," Lukashevich admitted. However, the OSCE points cautiously to a positive-looking trend that emerged at the recent consultations between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan in St Petersburg.

Also, OSCE officials not an agreement on resumption of talks on the Dniester region problem in the Five plus Two format.

The crisis in Ukraine as a threat to stability

The organizers have decided to single this issue out as a topic for a separate discussion. It is keynoted as ‘security and stability in the OSCE area in the wake of events in Ukraine’.

Officials say the conflict in Ukraine "remain the major challenge to security in the space of the OSCE." They have offered the participants to go beyond discussion of the measures towards settling the situation and to consider the overall impact the crisis has had on security in Europe.

"The operations of the Special Monitoring Mission in the zone of conflict will be in focus of discussions," Lukashevich said. "Understandably, it will be difficult to find any common denominators, as the positions on the problem differ widely between Russia and other countries making up the Normandy Four format."

Along with it, Lukashevich hopes the Ukrainian crisis will not put up obstacles in the way of fruitful dialogue at the conference, "although the experience of discussions at the OSCE Permanent Council and in other format here in Vienna prompts one shouldn’t expect the discussion will do without sharp escapades towards Russia."

"And yet we’ll try to put our partners in tune as regards consideration of the ways out of the conflict in Ukraine that can be settled exceptionally on the basis of the Minsk accords and some other follow-up documents," he said.