BERLIN, September 9. /TASS/. In case the issue of disarmament does not go back to the European agenda, it may come to a new arms race between the West and the East, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin on Friday while speaking at an international conference on foreign policy issues.
"If we leave the situation unattended and the disarmament issue does not return again to the European agenda, if we do not make it a matter of dialogue with Russia, then in a few years we will possibly be watching something get again out of our control and we find ourselves in a situation of a new arms race between the West and East," Steinmeier said.
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He said "everyone will lose" in that case.
The German foreign minister stated that "the situation with security in Europe has changed."
"We should be able to defend ourselves, or, in other words, those who feel under threat," he said. "But it’s only one side. The other side is understanding that long-term security may only be ensured in Europe by common efforts."
"We have a number of documents on disarmament from past years - some of them have been violated, others are not taken into account, and some have just grown outdated, as technologies have changed," Steinmeier said, adding that drones appeared, just as "military strategies that earlier, when agreements were struck, did not play any role at all."
The minister said his proposal on restart of the armament control system, voiced in an article for a German newspaper, "received positive responses."