Russian diplomats want to extend an olive branch to President Trump’s team, contingent on the United States and western powers taking the blame for current tensions with Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration conducted a “foreign ministry collegium” to “analyse Russia-West relations” and how they might be improved. Their verdict was clear.
“It was pointed out that these relations had deteriorated through the fault of Russia’s Western partners,” the Foreign Ministry bulletin said. “Equal and honest interaction is only possible if the attempts to ‘contain’ Russia are abandoned and if relations are based on the principle of non-interference in internal affairs and respect for each other’s interests.”
The statement declared Russia’s willingness to work “with the new US administration” to combat terrorist threats if western governments agreed on “the vital importance of normalising the current abnormal situation” between Russia and the West. Russia has been under economic sanctions since 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine over protests against a pro-Russian Ukrainian president who opposed an economic agreement with the European Union.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov separately denied that Russia has any desire to dominate former Soviet satellite states.
“Allegations about some ‘neo-imperial’ ambitions or even plans to restore the USSR belong to the genre of science fiction and do not merit a serious discussion,” Lavrov said while discussing Russia’s relationship with Central Asian governments in an interview published Wednesday. “Russia has always treated with respect the former Soviet republics’ choice in favor of independence and independent development. We are cooperating in various formats and this cooperation is based strictly on the principles of equality and regard for each other’s interests.”
Putin has worked to prevent or slow the breakup of Russia’s 20th-century sphere of influence from the beginning of his career as the top Russian leader, however. He launched a military campaign in Chechnya, which neighbors some of those Central Asian countries, that negated Chechnya’s brief period of independence in the 1990s. “It’s a continuation of the collapse of the USSR. Clearly, at some point, it has to be stopped,” Putin said during a series of interviews for a book about his life, First Person, that was published in 2000. “[W]e’d be facing a second Yugoslavia on the entire territory of the Russian Federation — the Yugoslavization of Russia.”
Lavrov warned western leaders recently that the historical era that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire has ended and called for them to cooperate in the establishment of a new world order.
“If you want, you can call it a ‘post-West’ world order, when each country — based on its sovereignty, within the rules of international law — will strive to find a balance between its own national interests and the national interests of partners, with respect for cultural, historical and civilization identity of each country,” Lavrov said in February at the Munich Security Conference.
