MOSCOW, December 9. /TASS/. Moscow hopes that the United States and its allies in Europe will not step over the "red lines" and will refrain from setting loose the confrontation spiral, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at a meeting of the board of trustees of the Russian International Affairs Council on Thursday.
"We hope that Washington and its European allies will display wisdom and recall, at last, the fundamental principle of equal and indivisible security, which implies respect for the interests and concerns of all countries in the Euro-Atlantic without an exception and will refrain from stepping over the ‘red lines’ that there exist and that have been drawn pretty clearly for the opponents to see. This will allow for preventing the confrontation spiral from going loose," he said.
For now, he remarked, the West remains unprepared for such interaction.
"The policy of Russia’s systemic containment continues to gain strength and tensions near Russia’s borders are soaring. There is great concern over the supplies of lethal weapons to the regime in Kiev and the provocative attempts to drag Ukraine into its orbit," he stressed.
Ryabkov recalled that Russia’s Foreign Ministry in accordance with instructions from President Vladimir Putin was working on the creation of "reliable and long-term security guarantees on the Western track."
"The issue on the agenda is creation of legal guarantees that would include NATO’s non-expansion to the east, and non-deployment near our territory of any weapon systems threatening us," he explained.