MOSCOW, March 3. /TASS/. Russian foreign intelligence service chief Sergey Naryshkin said in a statement on Thursday the US hopes that Russia will get bogged down in Ukraine won’t come true.
"Washington is really hoping that we will get bogged down in this operation and wither away, and they will be able to quietly do the ‘cleansing’ of the Middle East, Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific region," he was quoted as saying in the statement released by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. "This won’t happen: ‘The old has gone, the new is here.’"
"Regarding the future of Ukraine, it will, of course, be determined by the Ukrainians themselves," he said in the statement. "But it will be a completely different Ukraine and a different story."
Naryshkin said that Western representatives like to call what is happening a "new cold war" but, according to him, this is not entirely appropriate. "If only because in the second half of the 20th century Russia fought with the West on the distant approaches, and now the war has come to the very borders of our homeland," he said. "So, for us it is definitely not "cold," but quite "hot."
He said that a fundamentally new phase in European and world history is unfolding at the moment. "Its essence lies in the collapse of the unipolar world and the system of international relations based on the right of the strongest, that is, the United States, to destroy other states in order to prevent the slightest possibility of their transformation into alternative centers of power," Naryshkin said. "It was these goals that were pursued in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria."
"This is precisely what the West was going for with its efforts to draw Ukraine into the orbit of its influence and turning it into a Russophobic puppet state," he went on to say. "Today Russia is openly challenging this system by creating a truly multipolar world, which has never existed before and from which everyone will benefit in the future."
The head of the Foreign Intelligence Service also pointed out that the vast majority of Asian, African and even Latin American countries did not join the Western "blockade."
"The eastern and southern directions are still open for our development," Naryshkin said. "And Russia itself is a strong state with nuclear weapons, huge reserves of energy and natural resources, developed human potential, true faith and a spiritual mission."
"Russia ‘does not fit in your hat,’ the spiritually poor gentlemen, it is impossible to isolate her," he said.
He added that the current conflict in Ukraine is "a good reason to conduct a thorough revision of international legal regimes and obligations, to develop fundamentally new modalities of relations with the West and with the whole world."
"The war in the post-Soviet space, if someone hasn’t noticed, hasn’t been going on for 30 years, and now Russia has a real chance to put an end to this," Naryshkin said.