West deceived post-Cold War Russia: diplomat

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 yesterday.

“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 that 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. TASS

“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 wrote a small piece that what they had taken for a submarine was something else,” she said. TASS