West Insists On Trying To Turn Balkans Into 'Staging Ground' Against Russia - Lavrov

The West insists on trying to turn the Balkans into yet another "staging ground" against Russia, no lessons have been taken from the situation in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 17th November, 2018) The West insists on trying to turn the Balkans into yet another "staging ground" against Russia, no lessons have been taken from the situation in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

"It seems as if the lessons from the tragedy in Ukraine have not been learned. Today, there are persistent efforts to turn the Balkans into yet another staging ground against Russia," Lavrov told Srpski Telegraf newspaper.

According to Lavrov, the countries of the region "are being asked insistently to make a choice: Either they are with Moscow, or with Brussels and Washington."

The minister said that Moscow knew that Belgrade was under pressure to decrease cooperation with Russia and saw that Serbia was "resisting confidently.

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"Moscow appreciates Serbia's independent multi-faceted foreign policy that, I am sure, corresponds to the key interests of your people," Lavrov said.

Instead of building together with Russia a security architecture based on the principles of equality, Western countries opted for "a dead-end way of increasing the geopolitical territories under their control, creating new demarcation lines on the European continent," the minister said, when asked about the attempts of the Western officials to alienate Serbia from Russia.

According to Lavrov, the 2014 events in Ukraine when a new government came to power, "orchestrated and supported" by the United States and a number of European countries, were one of the results of such policy of the West.