All what Russia wants
from Europe is to cooperate, "to develop economy, trade and cultural
ties," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
HELSINKI, June 19.
/TASS/. By the end of the Cold War Russia fully opened up to the Western
countries, but they deceived it, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria
Zakharova told Finland’s Hufvudstadsbladet newspaper on Tuesday.
"We fully opened
up to the West, but not because we were defeated. We did that ourselves, no one
invaded us," the diplomat said.
Last Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of the perestroika program, "just wanted
to end the arms race," she noted. "He wanted to end the Cold War. And
so we opened up and were deceived. You responded by fencing us off with a
barbed wire."
All what Russia wants
from Europe is to cooperate, "to develop economy, trade and cultural
ties," according to Zakharova. "We want to freely go to each other’s
countries, and we want to get rid of a necessity to obtain visas. But they
always snub us," she noted.
"This is like
[the story] with Russian submarines in Sweden: everyone knows that they are
[there], but no one has seen them. A month later when all Swedish people were
frightened, mass media write a small piece that what they had taken for a
submarine was something else," Zakharova said.
Source: ITAR-TASS
19-06-2018
