MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/. Moscow got burned when it trusted the West to keep its promise not to expand the North Atlantic Alliance to the east, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with RT.
The minister was asked whether it was true that Russia was not ready to negotiate on other countries' terms because of past experiences when it was "burned" by the West's deception about NATO expansion.
"To a large extent, yes. Maybe I wouldn't be so blunt. The most important thing is that you just said that we were definitely burned by our trust in people who swore that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east, infringing on Russia, that we would have a common space from Lisbon to Vladivostok, and this entire vast continent would be a continent of peace and security," he replied.
The minister said that Russia had created a Russia-NATO Council with Western countries "in an effort to establish a permanent dialogue and increase trust so that ‘interesting’ information about its armed forces could be presented within this structure. A lot of good came of that, including transparency. Nevertheless, NATO first lost its existential purpose, then found it in Afghanistan.
"Later, when this purpose was publicly trampled on in Afghanistan, in public, in front of the entire world community, something had to be done. They laser-focused then, got their act together and came up with what is happening now and what we are witnessing now. They say that Russia should be made a ‘pariah,’ and provoked, Ukraine was the ‘optimal material’ from which something like this could be 'molded'".
Lavrov said that in the West this "material was kneaded" immediately after the disappearance of the USSR. "All the promises not to expand NATO, not to infiltrate into the immediate neighborhood of the Russian Federation - all this has been crossed out," he concluded.