Transcript of Remarks and Response to Questions by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov at Brussels Forum 2009, Brussels, March 21, 2009
Philip Stephens (moderator): I'm going to start with a question to Mr. Lavrov and it's this. We've heard recently from the Russian President that Russia wants a new set of security arrangements for Europe. A lot of the reaction in Europe to that has been one, what does it mean. There hasn't been enough detail. And two, is this another Russian way of trying to detach us from NATO?
I wonder Mr. Lavrov, whether you'd explain to us what the plan is and how it fits with the security architecture we already have.
Foreign Minister Lavrov: Thank you very much and this is certainly a new question.
Well, do we feel secure in the Euro-Atlantic area? Yes, we have organizations, several of them. We have assumed political commitments. We have the principles enshrined in OSCE documents and in Russia-NATO Council documents. They are related to the indivisibility of security as one of the most important principles (and of course not to mention territorial integrity and sovereignty).
No one challenges these principles. But some of them, especially those related to hard security exist in the form of political commitments, and they don't seem to be working. They haven't been working for quite a long time – ever since the demise of the Soviet Union, when the arrangements and political commitments were first and foremost not to expand NATO.
Then, when the first wave of NATO expansion did take place, an agreement was reached, stipulating that the alliance would not put any substantial combat forces in the new member countries. This wasn't delivered either.
They next assured us that the NATO expansion aimed to encompass Eastern Europe and the Baltic States only. So don't you worry, they said, because this move will solidify security and these countries, with their understandable fears and historical memory, will feel safe in the NATO fold and "won't be nervous any more." None of this happened.
The principle of the indivisibility of security says that no country should secure itself at the expense of another. It has been adopted at the top level in the OSCE and the Russia-NATO Council, but we just don't see it being used in practice. And I won't mention the military bases now deployed very close to Russian territory; I won't mention the certain moves related to missile defense. You know all this.
So if we still abide by these principles, our suggestion is let's get together and make them legally binding. About a year ago, at the Russia-NATO summit in Bucharest, we sought to have a joint declaration adopted, but it did not meet with approval, because of a disagreement over restating, as in the Russia-NATO Council basic documents, that no one should secure himself at the expense of another.
We do of course have questions. Why is that so? We just want to check whether the endorsed principles concerning military-political security are still valid for all members of the Euro-Atlantic area. And if they are, why shouldn't they be made legally binding?
Plus we want in this new exercise and in a new Treaty, to agree on criteria for conflict settlement, so that we don't have one standard for Kosovo and another for everything else.
It has to be noted that the arms control process is also in a state of crisis. Our NATO colleagues failed to ratify the Adapted CFE Treaty under farfetched pretexts, trying again and again to mix the legally binding CFE Treaty and political commitments together into one pile. Later, when Russia also fulfilled these political commitments, known as the Istanbul Commitments, new interpretations of what should be done for NATO to ratify the Adapted CFE Treaty emerged.
So we also want in this exercise to agree on the principles for arms control and to make them legally binding. This is not to substitute for efforts to revive the CFE regime. But we do want this CFE effort to continue and not be limited to the Russian-US dialogue. Europeans should participate in this work, because it is about conventional forces in Europe after all, and we count on their active involvement in this endeavor. In this context we welcome the initiative by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to convene a high-level meeting of experts in Germany in June this year to consider the situation surrounding the CFE Treaty.
At issue is reaffirmation of the principle of indivisibility of security; the creation of mechanisms to be activated when any participant of this arrangement feels insecure; the criteria for conflict settlement, and principles for arms control. And of course in the new treaty proposed by us, a new quality of cooperation could find reflection, cooperation in countering terrorism, ensuring the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and addressing the other threats and challenges which we all face today.
Why not do it within the existing structures? The answer is simple: NATO cares solely for the security of its own members, as does the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CIS and the European Union, with its European Security and Defense Policy – all these structures represent clubs or organizations created for their own security.
The OSCE is a universal organization, and no one questions its principles – including Russia. But the OSCE has been neglectful of hard security issues for a long time now. Although the OSCE has the Forum for Security Cooperation and the Annual Security Review Conference purportedly to discuss these issues, there is no movement here. We want to change this situation. We are striving to reactivate the OSCE, which has been really neglectful of these issues hitherto. At the end of June I am planning to visit Vienna to attend the Security Review Conference.
There is a second problem with the OSCE: it embraces countries, but no organizations. We believe that a new treaty must be negotiated by all member states, plus all the organizations active in the realm of security within our common space.
Lastly, speaking of commitments and legal obligations, the OSCE is not a legally binding organization. Like the Russia-NATO Council, it only has political commitments, not legally binding obligations. Contrastingly, the obligations in NATO are legally binding. This gives rise to different security levels.
So basically this is the thinking behind our idea.
Q&A Session:
Foreign Minister Lavrov (speaks after the opening comments of Javier Solana): We want not only the OSCE, but also all security organizations in this space to be involved in these efforts.
Secondly, regarding the three security dimensions and that you can only move on with all three dimensions being considered in a package, no one questions the humanitarian or economic basket of the OSCE. The humanitarian part of the OSCE has its own mechanisms which work and which produce results – with difficulty at times, but they do work. In the hard security area, it is a total zero.
And by the way if we are to speak about the linkages between hard security and soft security – when the negotiations on the missile defense facilities in Europe were under way, did anyone link that with human rights or democracy? What was the linkage with the third basket, when the military bases were being created in Romania and Bulgaria?
So let's just try to grasp that there is a real failure in the hard security area. We want to fix things in this domain without challenging the comprehensive approach towards security. Let's just remove this disbalance.
Question: Mr. Lavrov, you said in your introduction that there had been some agreements in 1989 or in 1991 at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union. And one of them was not to expand NATO and the other one was not to have any US or Western military forces in any ex-Warsaw Pact countries. First of all I'm not aware that there were any such agreements made. Perhaps they were oral. My question for you is this. In what way does NATO now threaten Russia?
Foreign Minister Lavrov: The question was asked and I will say yes. Yes, unfortunately those were oral promises and commitments. But very firm oral promises.
And basically I think we were naïve. Those who were taking those promises were naïve. I've read transcripts of the top-level negotiations. I know what I am talking about. And the naivety stemmed from the conviction that after the Soviet Union the world was set for a new era and everyone was going to be brothers and sisters. It didn't happen. But yes, those were oral commitments.
As to the presence of the US forces in Eastern Europe, two military bases are under construction – in Romania and Bulgaria. And this is a fact; it's not an oral form, but quite material.
As to whether NATO now threatens Russia, the arrangements reached in the 1990s between Russia and NATO were that the Russia-NATO Council is not "26 plus one," but "27 members" and that each country should participate in its national capacity. Of course that never worked in practice, which is another problem that we have.
We regard NATO as a reality. We want to cooperate with it and see the potential for this cooperation: Afghanistan, joint airspace control, a whole array of other fields – compatibility of peacekeeping forces, etc. But we also don't like that NATO takes it upon itself to judge everyone and everything. And that NATO bombed Yugoslavia without any legal justification, without okay from the Security Council and in violation of the United Nations Charter. The new NATO strategy or doctrine – in principle, it's an open material – includes more and more scenarios where force could be used, not necessarily with Security Council authorization. This bothers us because we do believe that international law ought to be universally applied and that there should be no privileged security areas.
We just don't understand why NATO is expanding. We don't understand why this military infrastructure is being moved to our borders. Missile defense is a separate issue. During the course of the last few years, we have been quietly reducing our military presence in the Kaliningrad area. And yet we are going to have a third positioning area of the US global missile defense system?
And of course we don't understand why NATO or some NATO members are in effect pushing Ukraine into the alliance when only 18 percent of the Ukrainian people support the entry. And why NATO is still saying that Georgia should become a NATO member, even though the current Georgian regime used brutal force in violation of all its international obligations.
And my very last point, I think that, frankly, I don't want to make it a secret – before Mr. Saakashvili gave orders to attack South Ossetia, we had been talking very intensively with Condoleezza Rice. And I had kept asking repeatedly: Why don't you persuade them to sign a nonuse of force agreement? Why don't you stop providing them with offensive arms? And she told me, don't you worry. And I also said, with all this, why are you pulling them into NATO? And she said, don't you worry, if he uses force, he could forget about NATO. Okay, he did use force.
I agree that any country has the sovereign right to choose its partners and to choose those with whom to enter into alliance. Take Ukraine. I said that public opinion polls indicated less than 20 percent of Ukrainians want NATO membership. In the case of Georgia NATO was recently called a "school for democracy." But what sort of democracy is it that starts an aggression and deprives hundreds upon hundreds of civilians of their lives? I leave this to NATO members to clarify.
But I certainly want to pick on OSCE problems. Yes, consensus means that everyone has a veto. That's the case, except the "consensus minus one" arrangement which is applied to human rights violations. As far as I remember, this "consensus minus one" mechanism was agreed in Moscow in 1991 just after the putsch and just before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and it continues to operate.
Yes, the OSCE needs some revamping. And for three or four, maybe five years Russia together with several other nations has been promoting the idea of negotiations to adopt an OSCE charter. It is called an organization, but it is not an organization. It does not have legal capacity. We have submitted a number of documents which, if agreed, would bring more transparency in OSCE actions, including election monitoring, cooperation with nongovernmental organizations, appointment of field missions and their mandates. We want these field missions to be in line with the existing documents.
We also want to do something about the unacceptable situation with the OSCE budget, where any country can just say it wants to make an extra-budgetary contribution for a specific project in country X. And this offer, without going to the Permanent Council or any intergovernmental body, immediately gets OSCE project status. So anyone can do anything in any country and receive an OSCE umbrella. This is wrong. It gives rise to unnecessary suspicions. And when people don't want to consider those modalities for the OSCE to become transparent and clear to everybody, we tend to think that these people just want to use the OSCE, with its very vague rules and practices, for the purposes which are not OSCE-endorsed purposes.
Foreign Minister Lavrov: Yes, I agree making something a law does not mean that security would be ensured. International law, including the UN Charter, has been repeatedly violated. But I do believe that at least we should try to be honest to each other. And if we assume some political commitments, which remain in force, then we may try to do it. And if we are, all of us, still committed to those political arrangements, then why not make them legally binding and why not, together with NATO, with the OSCE, with the Collective Security Treaty Organization, with the Russia-NATO Council after all, and with the European Union of course, have a look at whether we can develop mechanisms which will not affect all these organizations with their own rules, but will be acceptable to all and applicable by all. We don't have an answer how this might work and whether it would work at all. But we believe it is worth a try.
I agree that to speak of the Treaty today is premature. What we want is to discuss the substance of these problems and try to see whether people would be really interested in making sure that everyone is comfortable. Javier did recognize that the current situation suits most Europeans. It does the Americans. But the third pillar – as you called us – of European security, Russia is not comfortable.
It is an invitation to a dialogue like this. And I would really welcome a phase of these discussions, perhaps later down the road, when we answered all questions and started developing some constructive ideas. There is a hope that this will happen. We have already encouraged some think tanks in Russia, Germany and France. And they're working together, arranging for a series of conferences to advance a variety of ideas. In any case, we just want a second opinion on everything: on missile defense, on the Istanbul commitments linked to the CFE, and on the expansion of NATO as a space of democracy and security.
Question: Mr. Lavrov, what's your level of ambition for these new security arrangements? Are they really about Russia having the right of veto on hard security arrangements on the continent of Europe, what you referred to as second opinion? Or could they really be used to forge a common position between NATO and Russia in terms of common external threats outside Europe, for example, nonproliferation with regard to Iran, also North Korea?
Foreign Minister Lavrov: No to the first question, yes to the second one, but not only with regard to Iran and North Korea. It is about our own feeling of security. Yes, to forge a common position. I just said we don't have any recipes, we want an honest discussion.
On forgetting history, if it is about forgetting the basis of Russia-NATO cooperation then it's some honest discussion I would say. So I hope this is not an invitation to forget everything which we committed ourselves to. And I already quoted some examples when these commitments were not delivered on the other side of the Russia-NATO Council.
Secondly, we are not perfect. Nobody's perfect, as the line goes from the famous movie. And I hope that this is also realized by everyone, including our American partners. The message which President Obama sent yesterday to the Iranian people and government, I believe, is an example of how people should be self-critical, including the people at the very top. And this is an example to follow.
On missile defense we are generally in favor of joint cooperation on an equal basis. But we are told that this is a particular issue, that a threat from the south to Europe and to the United States can only be repulsed by this particular response, and when we try to provide our own analysis, offering alternatives, they tell us that maybe this can also be handy, but the major part of the system will be theirs. Even in the United States, the Budget Office of Congress circulated a report which has at least three alternatives to the third positioning area in Poland and the Czech Republic. American scientists speak about using drones to counter the threat of a missile attack in West Asia and East Asia. Yes, we are ready to cooperate on those threats. We take them seriously. But we want to cooperate on an honest basis where no one by definition or ex officio has any intellectual priority. Let's think together.
On Siberia and the Russian Far East, we are indeed going to enhance our investment in those areas. We welcome foreign investments including from Japan, South Korea. We are discussing specific projects and the attraction of businesses.
Javier, in August 2008 you said you were concerned. We were outraged. It was a blatant aggression violating the international commitments of Georgia to which President Saakashvili had subscribed and he gave orders to kill peacekeepers and civilians. So I can agree that it was an absolutely unacceptable behavior and I hope – this, by the way, concerns our proposals for the discussion of European security – that we will reiterate in a legally binding document that no one should use force to resolve conflicts under international observation.
And lastly with regard to your concern about the gas crisis, I hope that you will also talk to the transit countries. Two years ago when this happened for the first time, you in Brussels suggested that we should develop an early warning mechanism. We said, "Fine, yes, but let's include the transit countries in this early warning mechanism." There was no reaction from Brussels, and there is still none. I don't know how this was discussed and why we lost all this time and did not develop this early warning thing involving the producers, consumers and the transit countries.
By the way, if you look at the eastern part of Russia, you will see that we sell hydrocarbons to China. We have now begun to sell liquefied gas to Japan, we have many customers there and there never was an interruption in supply. So can you think of why this is happening, why it's only in the western direction that we have an interruption every now and then? We are prepared to discuss this openly, we think we reached a fair deal with our Ukrainian colleagues, a deal was welcomed by Europe having helped to negotiate it; so let's stick to these deals, and let's just make sure that everyone is involved in this early warning mechanism and hopefully in its functioning smoothly.
Tomas Moneretas: Could Russia try to seduce its neighbors instead of threatening them?
Foreign Minister Lavrov: On this one the answer's very easy. Seriously speaking I believe, I mean if you want to make a funny point and to be happy with yourself, you have the right to do so. I want Russia to be understood. Russian foreign policy is not about fear; it's about fairness. That's what we want. And when we, every now and then, see unfairness in dealing with our partners, when promises are being broken, commitments are not delivered we do have concerns.
And what I would also say, following up on what Javier said now, yes, between Russia and the European Union and between Russia and NATO we have documents on which we base our relationships and those are very valuable relationships. With you we have the four common spaces and the four roadmaps to build those four common spaces, and we stated in that very important document that integration processes in the entire Soviet space and in the European Union should be compatible, they should not be mutually exclusive and they should be mutually supportive.
Besides, Javier mentioned the Eastern Partnership. We are accused of trying to intimidate or pressure others. What is the Eastern Partnership? Is it not a case of intimidating and pressuring others, including Belarus which you care so much about – this we would like to understand? And when my good friend, Karel Schwarzenberg, publicly says that in the case of recognition by Belarus it can forget about the Eastern Partnership, how are we to call this – threats, blackmail or democracy at work?
We were told originally that the Eastern Partnership is about cooperation, including with Russian participation to some extent. And then after this type of statements we have questions – is it about pulling countries from the positions which they are supposed to take freely?
And one more remark concerning Russia, NATO, Afghanistan and mutual interest: our Ambassador, who is in this room, has been trying recently to get consent that Russia could be part of the format which NATO uses to discuss Afghanistan with the Central Asian countries. It took him a lot just to make the point. If you want us to cooperate on Afghanistan why do you talk to us separately and to Central Asia separately; why not hold talks between NATO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which is very active in suppressing the drug trafficking in Afghanistan? We have been knocking on the NATO door with this question for five years now.
I will address the three comments made. On the privileged relationship we have repeatedly explained that we cannot consider countries with whom we are bound by centuries-old relations as something not important to us. By the same token Russia is a privileged territory for them. They have millions of their migrant workers earning their salaries in Russia to help their families. The links among us are so numerous that it's impossible to ignore it and I hope this is understood.
We're not against any one of our neighbors having good relations, common projects and tasks with the European Union. We have been talking to the EU for the last several years, explaining to them that isolating Belarus is a mistake. We have been talking to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where Belarus was temporarily deprived of its status as an invited guest. To rectify this situation, we will promote a conference between Belarus and the European structures – so we have nothing against this. On the contrary we will only benefit if both Russia and the European Union stick to the principle "we don't play games in this neighborhood and we do not serve countries with the wrong ultimatums of ‘you're either with us, or against us'."
Several years ago there were voices from one of the European capitals close by, saying exactly this: that these countries must decide who they are with. We don't want situations where some of our western friends travelling in Central Asia would tell the receiving presidents, "You have to choose. You're either going to be a colony of Russia or you will be part of the free world." This is unacceptable. It is a game in which the lawful rights of these countries are totally ignored and no respect is shown for the countries themselves. So the answer is, yes, we want to do it together, we want to do it openly, we understand the interest of the European Union and the United States in Central Asia: it's about hydrocarbons, it's about transit routes, it's about fighting terrorism and it's about nonproliferation. So we understand the interests, but we want these interests to be promoted by understandable and transparent means, not by some under the carpet whispering into their ears.
I understand these emotions. I can only say I hope the Georgian people will eventually have leaders who will put the interests of the Georgian people at the top of the list and not give orders to kill people whom they themselves declared to be their citizens, and who will respect their neighbors and live in peace with everybody.
On Iran I would only say I agree with what Javier said. What to do to make sure that Iran does not have a nuclear bomb – first of all there is no proof that Iran has ever intended to make the bomb. So long as the IAEA works in Iran, it monitors all the centrifuges producing low enriched uranium for fuel purposes. To convert it into weapons-grade uranium you need to do manipulations which would immediately be spotted by IAEA cameras; or if the cameras are switched off, we will also know that something took place which is wrong.
It's negotiations, it's respect and it's engagement of Iran in all the areas which we have indicated in the Three Plus Three paper offered to Iran, including security dialogue, not only on Iraq, which is natural, but on the entire spectrum of problems in the Near and Middle East: Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon. Iran must be engaged as a constructive part of the solution, not as part of the problem.
March 31, 2009
