MINSK, July 1. /TASS/. The leadership of EU countries nowadays is satisfied that the chief role on the continent is not played by them but by the US, and French President Emmanuel Macron is the only exception, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
"Nowadays, unfortunately, the European Union is not an independent player," the Russian top diplomat said at a meeting with the students and teaching staff of Belarusian State University, adding that he found the expression "the decline of Europe" particularly prophetic.
He reiterated that Yevgeny Primakov, while serving as a foreign minister in 1996-1997 introduced the term "multipolar world" and was fostering cooperation between Russia, India and China. "Then this group of three spawned the BRICS group of five. Back then we had assumed that one of the multipolar world’s influential poles would be precisely the European Union. This didn’t happen," he added.
He reiterated that earlier in Europe there was talk about the necessity to "ensure the strategic autonomy of the European Union." "There is still talk about this but only by President Macron. The rest are simply enjoying the fact that the Americans are in charge of everything and all the decisions made in the European Union have been largely imposed by Washington," the foreign minister noted.
"I am not even mentioning NATO, this is a totally American organization. And the European Union became an appendix of sorts of US policy in Europe, unfortunately," the top diplomat remarked. He noted that "it is the European Union, above all, that suffers from the sanctions being imposed by the West" since the US introduced the sanctions in such a way so that "not too much damage is caused to its economy" although this still resulted in price hikes on fuel and food products there.
"Yes, the decline of Europe, I would say, although Europe is the civilization closest to us. Culture, art, literature - we’ve been always enriching each other, and it is sad that nowadays it is considered European to demand a ban on studying Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov at educational institutions," Russia’s diplomacy chief concluded.