MOSCOW, July 23. /TASS/. Russia is convinced that it is necessary to keep the door open for the European Union to cooperate in Eurasia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

"Euro-Atlantic security, embodied by North America and Europe in such structures as NATO and the OSCE, has discredited itself. All its variants boiled down to the US trying to subjugate others, so Eurasian security is an overdue issue," he pointed out. "That is why in this case, as well as in the case of economic cooperation and the development of the system of military and political security, the doors should remain open for the western part of our continent," the top diplomat said.

In particular, he recalled that President Vladimir Putin had said that Russia, which promotes the idea of the Greater Eurasian Partnership, "does not close its doors to any country on the Eurasian continent."

However, according to Lavrov, the EU countries that want to join such cooperation must "enter these processes on the basis of equality and full respect for the interests of those who started interacting earlier."

The Greater Eurasian Partnership is Putin’s initiative, which he has put forward during his Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly in 2015. It involves the creation of a broad integration framework in Eurasia. The partnership is based on promoting a fair polycentric world order with equal and mutually beneficial economic cooperation.