MOSCOW, October 21./TASS/. Reproaches from the European Union targeting Belarus and Russia in connection with a flow of refugees to Europe are groundless, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Thursday.
"Appeals to Minsk and Moscow to restrain an exodus of refugees in the form they are presented are inconsistent, given the activities of the Western coalition in the region of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Afghanistan, of course," the diplomat noted.
"What do Minsk and Moscow have to do with this? How did they manage to combine these issues? All this looks at least strange," Zakharova went on to say.
According to her, shifting the blame and inventing some hybrid attacks looks specifically ridiculous against the background of how the evacuation from Afghanistan proceeded, when tens of thousands of people were left without a way to support themselves. "Through different ways, through different channels and paths, they are trying to flee the territory of their country, ending up in various countries, along the borders, moving to other continents," she went on to say.
"What do we have to do with it? For 20 years, Western countries continued this campaign in Afghanistan, and all this time we urged them to tell the UN Security Council what they were doing there," she said.
Throughout that period, conflicting statements were constantly coming either about the withdrawal of troops or about the buildup of the group. "Washington’s actions were changing in accordance with the party policy: the US treated the situation in Afghanistan depending on which party came to the White House," she stated. "Moreover, different concepts could be heard within the same administration. Nobody had a balanced view and analysis of the developments," she said.
"All this ended up in a global disaster both with the evacuation of their forces and with the humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan, and of course, this triggered a new spiral of the migration crisis," the spokeswoman stressed.