Interfax: Russia lost faith in Western leadership due to abuse of its trust – Pushkov

Alexei Pushkov file photo

MOSCOW. April 8 (Interfax) – Russia has stopped seeing the West as a leader because the West has abused Russia’s readiness for partnership, Alexei Pushkov, head of the State Duma committee on international affairs, said.

“Russia was not ready to see the West as a leader by the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, specifically, because the West abused Russia’s consent, readiness for partnership,” Pushkov said at a parliamentary hearing on the issue ‘Russia-West: What Will Prevail: the Logic of Resistance or the Logic of Interaction’.

He also said the U.S. by that moment had already withdrawn from the ABM Treaty, thus putting Russia’s security in jeopardy.

Additionally, the U.S. by that time “had conducted two waves of NATO expansion and was preparing a third one, supported the orange revolution in Ukraine and was preparing the accession of Ukraine, which was then led by Viktor Yushchenko, to NATO,” he said.

“In response to our readiness for interaction, we received the readiness of the West to strengthen their geopolitical positions at our expense as much as possible,” Pushkov said.

He said the developments in the Middle and Near East led to the discrediting of Western countries.

“The bad foreign policy decisions made by the West on a number of tracks led to high instability. The arch of instability that stretches from Northern Africa to Pakistan has turned into an arch of wars and terrorism, that is, the situation has deteriorated,” the parliamentarian said.

Pushkov believes that Russia in this situation cannot support the Western approaches to the regulation of international relations because they have proven to be inappropriate. At the same time, as soon as Russia made a decision on participation in the settlement of the Syrian crisis, the situation in that country improved and Western countries don’t want to recognize that, the parliamentarian said.

He also recalled that the Russian president had stated all main reasons why the type of interaction that now exists between the West and Russia needs to be changed at the Munich Conference in 2007.

[featured image is file photo]

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