MOSCOW, October 10. /TASS/. The current security crisis in Europe could have been avoided had NATO accepted the Moscow-led CSTO bloc's offer of cooperation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

"Had NATO not rejected the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) offer of cooperation, perhaps, many negative processes could have been avoided that led to the current European crisis, as Russia’s opponents had for years either refused to listen to Moscow or deceived it," Lavrov emphasized in an article titled "Observance of the Principles of the UN Charter in Their Entirety and Interconnectedness as Guarantees of Global Peace and Stability."

The Russian foreign minister pointed out that in accordance with Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which highlights the need to peacefully resolve disputes with the help of regional organizations, Russia and its allies had consistently called for establishing ties between the CSTO and NATO in order to facilitate the practical implementation of the decisions of CSTO summits that concerned indivisible security in Europe. "However, the North Atlantic Alliance ignored numerous requests from the highest CSTO bodies," Lavrov explained.

When commenting on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s October 5 statement about building a new world, Lavrov stressed that it’s "not about starting from scratch, erasing everything that our predecessors created." "The UN Charter is the foundation of the new world. It has already been laid and it’s a solid one," he went on to say. Right now, the key thing is to prevent attempts to destroy it, picking and choosing which of the Charter’s principles to follow, and make sure that they are implemented in their entirety and interconnectedness," the top Russian diplomat concluded.