MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. A striking example of the current crisis in European security is the artificially engineered situation in Ukraine, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy Planning Department, Alexey Drobinin, said in an interview with the International Affairs magazine on Tuesday.
"The most striking and acute manifestation of this [European security] crisis is the situation in Ukraine. It was artificially engineered, despite all our warnings and our proposals for cooperation," the diplomat said.
Drobinin stressed that for many years the West had stubbornly pressed for its own interests, while ignoring the interests of Russia in the field of security.
It was doing so in various ways, including the military-political expansion to the east, mostly NATO’s expansion, which admitted East European states and was making far-reaching promises to a number of former Soviet republics, in particular, Georgia and Ukraine, he added. "NATO’s military infrastructure was approaching Russia’s borders, thus creating a direct threat to the security interests of our country. Our leadership could not but react to this."
Drobinin drew attention to the fact that the West’s real aim was to eliminate Russia as a competitor and with it "the obstacle that Moscow, by virtue of its existence, creates on the way to the global dominance of the United States and its satellites in the international arena.".