MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/. In the early 1990s, the West declared the end of its confrontation with Moscow because it hoped that Russia would not be able to regain its standing in Europe and worldwide, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a press conference on European security issues on Thursday.
He recalled the events of 1990 when the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was held, during which all member states, including NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, approved the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. It enshrined the end of the era of confrontation and the split continent and proclaimed the removal of barriers to build a true shared European home without any dividing lines, Lavrov said.
"It seems that if everyone arrived at such correct declarations, what prevented them from being implemented? What got in the way was above all the fact that the West was not going to take any steps toward making these lofty words and obligations come to fruition," the Russian top diplomat pointed out.
"It is possible to assert with confidence that at that time, the West was signing under such slogans above all counting on our country never regaining its positions in Europe or, moreover, in the world, proceeding from the premise, that, as they were saying then, the end of history arrived and from then on everything would follow the rules of liberal democracy," Lavrov concluded.