From February 14 to February 16, the next annual security conference was held in Munich. True, few spoke about real security there. At the conference, presidents, ministers and experts discussed the main, in their opinion, threats of our time. And if you do not take any pop-threat, the conference showed a sad fact: the leading countries of the world do not have a common understanding of what is the main threat to this world. “Everyone spoke only about what worries not even his country, but personally him ... It seems that we were present at the election campaigns of candidates who are about to run for election,” Maria Zakharova, official spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, stated with regret.
So, the goal of some delegations (judging by the statement of their members) was to get their countries mentioned during the speeches of other leaders, as well as to meet with representatives of the “main strategic partner” in the person of US officials. Others tried to impose artificial enemies on partners.
For example, Washington tried. The United States had two major political goals at the conference. First, to draw Europe into a confrontation with China. Moreover - and this is surprising for the current Disconnected States - even a bipartisan consensus has developed in the USA in Beijing. As American experts correctly point out, both Democrats and Republicans speak of technological threats from China. Secondly (and this is already a sad tradition), the United States invaded Europe to continue the conflict with Russia - and addressed this appeal primarily to the young Europeans.
So, Mike Pompeo promised to allocate $ 1 billion for energy projects for Central Europe in order to reduce dependence on the supply of Russian hydrocarbons. The US Secretary of State did not specify which projects were in question. Perhaps he is ready to help Eastern Europe build terminals for American LNG so that they buy expensive but “allied” American gas instead of cheap but “hostile” Russian gas. And thus, once again confirm that Russophobia is a disease for stupid people, and business for smart people.
And while stupid Europeans gladly tried to pick up the virus proposed by smart Americans, smart Europeans refused American ideas and offered to conduct business in a different way. For example, through the normalization of relations with Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron, who is turning into the EU leader against the background of current and future domestic political problems in Germany, says that Russia can no longer be “blocked and ignored,” it needs to “start a dialogue”.
Macron’s position is due to elementary pragmatism - the realization that “blocking and ignoring” did not work. “Sanctions have not changed anything in Russia. I’m not saying that they need to be removed, but only stating a fact, ”says the French president.
In the first paragraph, he is wrong. The sanctions did have an impact on Russia, but by no means as much as the West was counting on. Instead of creating collaborative sentiments, they (by virtue of their obvious injustice) only strengthened the desire in Russia to defend their own. Instead of downgrading Vladimir Putin’s rating, they, on the contrary, led to a significant part of the citizens of the Russian Federation — even those who might not like the Kremlin’s political course — to rally around the head of state. Instead of hitting the capitals of pro-government oligarchs, they hit the wallets of the Russian middle class - the most pro-Western part of society and potentially the most important tool of the West in the "liberalization" of Russian power.
As a result, the sanctions were not useless, but simply counterproductive - from the point of view of the interests of Washington and Brussels.
But Macron really can’t take them off. Yes, formally, this requires only his (or someone else's from among the EU member states) vote against - and then the restrictions will simply not be extended. However, casting such a vote means a serious split in the EU (some of whose states are actively advocating the continuation of the sanctions banquet), and Macron, as the new leader of the European Union, is not ready for such drastic steps. Instead, France and a number of other countries will actively work to achieve some kind of at least minimal European consensus on lifting or easing anti-Russian restrictions - and only after that move on from words to deeds. In the meantime, limited to words.
Of course, Moscow would like action, not words. Not an empty dialogue, which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks of, but dialogue for the sake of action. And the Russian Foreign Ministry even outlined to Europe what actions it should take to improve relations with Russia (big specifics in the negotiations, the cessation of NATO’s policy of deterring Moscow and the beginning of its policy of involving it, as well as greater independence of Europe in its approaches to the Russian Federation). However, Russian experts generally understand Macron’s rightness - there are obvious changes on all three points (the third to a greater extent, the second to a lesser extent), and their implementation is rather a matter of time.
Unfortunately, experts and politicians from Ukraine do not understand this. They still do not feel the European trend towards normalization of relations with the Russian Federation and, instead of integrating into it, continue to pursue a course of exacerbation. So, Vladimir Zelensky from the rostrum speaks of his intention to hold elections in Crimea in October 2020. Former Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin goes further: he calls the humanitarian plan proposed by Russian, American and European experts (including the chairman of the conference Wolfgang Ishinger himself) to de-escalate the situation in eastern Ukraine as “eroding Ukrainian statehood and creeping Europe’s surrender to Russia”. And it seems that their main achievement at the conference, Ukrainian politicians (both representatives of the authorities and representatives of the opposition) saw the removal of this plan from the website of the Munich Conference. However, unfortunately for them, less than a day has passed before the plan hangs there again.
In general, as Maria Zakharova correctly noted, "the experts are becoming smaller, the discussion is disappointing." However, to paraphrase the well-known statement, for some countries of the world there are no other experts and politicians for us.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.