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Diplomat believes EU avoiding anti-terrorism cooperation with Russia

A Russian diplomat says the EU is using all types of pretexts to avoid pooling efforts with Russia
Vladimir Chizhov Grigory Sysoev/TASS
Vladimir Chizhov
© Grigory Sysoev/TASS

BRUSSELS, December 5. /TASS/. The European Union is using all types of pretexts to avoid pooling efforts with Russia against a common enemy of international terrorism, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov said on Monday.

"One would think that nothing may hinder the European Union, which is not a military bloc and is not directly involved in combat operations in that country [in Syria], to pool efforts with Russia to rebuff terrorism. The more so as people living in Brussels, like in many other European cities, have felt the lethal breath of misanthropic ideology of Islamic State and the like," Chizhov said at the European Russian Forum at the European Parliament.

"But as a matter of fact, we keep on encountering irrational behavior when the European Union is using various pretexts to dodge pooling efforts against the common enemy," he said.

"Suffice it to recall the demonstrative refusal of a number of the European Union member states to provide assistance to our navy squadron in the Mediterranean," he noted. "Let alone, on-going aweless attempts taken by certain representatives of the EU political establishments to put a sign of equality between Russia’s actions and Islamic State gunmen’s outrage. There is no explanation to such actions other than trying to prevent rapprochement between our country and EU member states at any cost for the sake of minute-serving political ambitions."

EU policy

The diplomat said the European Union has transformed relations with Moscow into a "hostage of settling a range of largely artificially provoked crises."

"However, today there is a truly paradoxical situation when our partners in the EU, who yielded to pressure from outside of Europe, in fact have morphed Russian-EU relations into a way to hold Moscow hostage to infinitely settling a range of fabricated crises whether they are close to our borders, or yours, or in other regions of the world," Chizhov stated.

The diplomat said this comes as "our interests and tasks, though not equal, largely coincide."

The events force us to ask "on what side of history" the EU finds itself now and if its position indeed reflects the interests of all of the EU’s citizens. The future character and vector of developing the Russian-EU relations depends on this answer, he stressed.