Question: What do you think about the results of the October 20-21 meeting of European Union’s leaders?
Maria Zakharova: The decisions adopted at the Council of the European Union meeting once again confirmed the confrontational nature of the European Union’s policy. The incumbent leadership of the EU and EU member countries are striving to impose the rules-based world order concept on the entire world. They are substituting fundamental principles of international law that are based on the UN Charter, including the right of nations to self-determination. This attempt also conceals the desire to ensure the West’s global hegemony, and this betrays an openly neo-colonial mentality. The discourse of Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief who has divided the world into the European garden and a jungle, merely confirms this.
We believe that statements accusing Russia of shelling the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure are the ultimate manifestation of hypocrisy. The EU has lost its moral right to say anything about war crimes because for eight years it had turned a blind eye to the murder of civilians, women and children during the Kiev regime’s shelling of Donbass territories. Today, the EU headquarters in Brussels continues to cover up for Kiev’s criminal actions. A feeling of complete impunity determines the aggressive behaviour of the Ukrainian authorities. Russia will continue to meticulously record and expose the masterminds and perpetrators of these crimes and their accomplices, and they will inevitably get the punishment they deserve.
We can see that the EU is not prepared to resolve the conflict by peaceful methods. On the contrary, they continue to thoughtlessly invest considerable assets in protracting hostilities. The decisions to allocate an additional 500 million euros for weapons shipments to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and establishing an EU mission that would provide military support to Ukraine aim to accomplish this objective. In effect, the EU will train Ukrainian militants and provide them with lethal weapons. These militants will continue to kill the civilian population and to destroy the civilian and critical infrastructure. Is the EU prepared to share responsibility for these crimes?
Regarding the EU’s domestic problems, European leaders are, as usual, absolving themselves of all responsibility and shifting it to others. The EU continues to groundlessly accuse Russia of provoking a food and energy crisis, as well as an economic crisis. The purpose of this misinformation is obvious. They are trying to distract public attention from the fact that the problems the international community is facing in these spheres, and this is particularly evident in developing countries, were mostly caused by the EU’s ill-conceived policy and by the West’s firmly embedded striving to ruthlessly exploit the natural and demographic resources of African, Asian and Latin American countries, as well as by the trade and economic war against Russia, including the introduction of unprecedented unilateral sanctions in terms of their scope and repercussions for the global economy.
Instead, the EU, which has virtually depleted its own potential for ratcheting up sanctions pressure against Russia, continues its attempts to force third countries to comply with the illegitimate EU restrictive measures. The West is openly using sanctions as a weapon in unscrupulous competition. This is fraught with greater worldwide crisis manifestations, and completely disregards the principle of states’ sovereign equality, a key principle of international relations.
Moreover, in an effort to inflict damage on Russia, EU leaders continue to seriously discuss the possibility of using and appropriating “frozen” Russian assets, showing their disdain for the fundamental principle of any free market economy: respect for private property.
We regret the fact that the EU, which has proclaimed itself as the main pillar of the rules-based order, is gradually turning into a region of lawlessness where it is possible to disregard the rights of foreign investors and foreign citizens for political reasons. The EU’s response to acts of sabotage with regard to the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines is the most graphic example. The EU Council’s findings say nothing about the need to conduct an investigation, which testifies to its strong reluctance to find out who is responsible for terrorist attacks against the largest European infrastructure project that was implemented in order to facilitate the real, rather than imaginary, energy security of EU member countries.
