MINSK, July 1. /TASS/. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been searching for an external enemy to justify its existence, but the bloc’s raison d’etre was actually gone with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
"They [NATO] have been constantly searching for an external enemy, to a large extent because of the need to preserve NATO’s raison d’etre which - and many Western politicians and analysts acknowledge that - disappeared when the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union ceased to exist," Lavrov commented on NATO’s policies at a meeting with Belarusian State University students and teaching staff.
Russia’s top diplomat recalled that Russia and the European Union used to hold summits twice a year, with regular meetings held between Russian government officials and the full European Commission. He also said practical cooperation was built around 20 sectoral dialogues then, and there existed four common spaces between Russia and the EU.