UNITED NATIONS, September 20. /TASS/. The current crisis in Europe could have been avoided if NATO had not turned down the proposals on cooperation from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a meeting of the UN Security Council on Ukraine.
"If NATO had not rejected the CSTO’s proposals on cooperation, this might have helped to avoid numerous negative processes that have brought about the current European crisis due to the fact that Russia was refused to be heeded or was deceived for decades."
According to Lavrov, Russia alongside its allies has consistently called for establishing contact between the CSTO and NATO in order to facilitate the implementation of the decisions on indivisibility of security adopted at OSCE summits, which read, "no State, group of States or organization can have any pre-eminent responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the OSCE area or can consider any part of the OSCE area as its sphere of influence."
"Everyone knows that it is exactly what NATO was doing in an attempt to establish its total superiority in Europe, and now in the Asia-Pacific Region. However, the CSTO supreme bodies’ numerous calls to NATO were ignored," he added.
The Russian top diplomat said that such "an arrogant stand of the United States and its allies" was caused by their unwillingness to get engaged in any equal dialogue with anyone.