MOSCOW, December 15. /TASS/. Forming a strong military and political foundation in Eurasia is in the best interest of Russia, Belarus and other countries in the region, particularly given NATO’s increasing activity, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
"NATO is increasing its military activity on the western borders of the Union State," the top Russian diplomat said, opening a board meeting of the foreign policy agencies of Russia and Belarus together with his Belarusian counterpart Sergey Aleinik. "The decisions of the alliance’s July summit in Vilnius confirm the intent of its members to aggressively contain Russia and Belarus," he added.
According to Lavrov, in today’s atmosphere it makes no sense to talk about a shared approach with Western countries to ensuring regional stability because at this stage, this is impossible. That said, he added "there is a task of building a stable architecture of security and cooperation across all of Eurasia together with constructively motivated countries and relying on the existing integration unions." "It is in our shared interests to form a reliable military-political base which will facilitate the settlement and prevention of conflicts as well as rule out any possibility of a military or any other forceful diktat or any domination by non-regional players," the Russian foreign minister stressed.
The top Russian diplomat also emphasized that the discussion on Eurasian security will be based on the results of the international conference on the issue that was held a couple of weeks ago in Minsk on the initiative of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. "We have a lot of mechanisms, platforms that will be interested in this joint work, I am talking about the CSTO (the Collective Security Treaty Organization - TASS), CIS (the Commonwealth of Independent States - TASS) and SCO (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - TASS) but also about the League of Arab States (LAS), the Gulf Cooperation Council and ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - TASS)," Lavrov concluded.