Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova's answer to a question from The International Affairs about the so-called Athens Declaration adopted by a number of European countries
28 August 2023 20:02
1651-28-08-2023
Question: What is your comment on the Athens Declaration adopted by the leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine, as well as the "premier" of Kosovo, following their meeting in Athens on August 21?
Maria Zakharova: The Athens Declaration provides new graphic evidence that the current EU leadership persists with its policy designed to Ukrainise the agenda of all multilateral cooperation formats. They select participants for each event of this sort, thus revealing for the umpteenth time the hidden designs behind any EU agenda.
The EU uses political and economic pressure and blackmail to induce Western Balkan countries to join its aggressive political line towards Russia. They want the accession countries to share collective responsibility. Their plan is to force them to be more proactive in aiding the neo-Nazi Kiev regime and support its totally unviable ultimatums that follow from Zelensky's absurd "peace formula." It is for this reason that the organisers of the Athens summit deliberately prioritised the Ukrainian theme, linked it directly to the European integration file, and turned Ukraine into the focal point of the final document approved following an event ostensibly dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the EU-Western Balkans Summit.
The EU does not take into consideration the real problems and aspirations of people living in Western Balkan countries. To continue its confrontation with Russia, the EU is ready to sacrifice the Western Balkan region's true development and security interests in violation of one of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter: respect for sovereignty and the right to independent development. They hypocritically refer in their final document to Russia's violation of the European security principles, which they, along with the United States, made null and void by their interventions in Yugoslavia in 1999, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2014. The EU countries were among those states that refused to accept, in 2008, the Russian proposal to make the indivisibility of security principle legally binding, despite the fact that this principle was repeatedly endorsed at the highest level in the OSCE documents and the papers of the Russia-NATO Council. They also rejected, in 2021, the Russia-drafted international agreements on security guarantees. They cynically introduce formulas on the "territorial integrity" of Ukraine in the joint document, while totally forgetting about their own attempts to separate Kosovo from Serbia. They are seeking to consolidate the pro-Western orientation of Western Balkan countries by putting them on a par with the anti-national governments in Kiev and Chisinau. They promise a radiant future to potential EU members in exchange for their support of the EU's anti-Russia policy, which is actually one of the criteria, if not the main condition, for acceding to the EU. These are clear manifestations of ideology-driven bloc thinking, which in no way facilitate a return of peace and security to the European continent.
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