Lavrov accuses EU of breaking ties with Russia

MOSCOW

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that the EU has been consistently breaking off relations with Russia for many years.

Most of the bodies created for the development of Russian-EU relations were either closed or frozen in recent years, he said, speaking at a news conference in Saint Petersburg with his Finnish counterpart Pekka Haavisto.

Currently, bilateral contacts are mostly focused on separate topics such as the Iranian nuclear problem or the Syrian conflict, Lavrov said.

However, Russia is ready to restore normal cooperation when the EU is ready for it, he added.

Commenting on the case of opposition figure Alexey Navalny and the detentions in Russia during unauthorized protests urging his release, Lavrov said the EU is concerned with human rights violations against Russians only in Russia while it ignores such violations against Russians in European countries, particularly in the Baltic states, where a non-citizen status for ethnic Russians exists.

“When Russian-speaking [TV] channels are being shut down and Russian-speaking journalists are prosecuted just because they are doing their job, when the shameful phenomenon of statelessness remains in the EU and the EU looks on without much desire to change anything, I believe that it’s not Russia that is distancing itself from the EU, but the EU drifting away from the Russian Federation,” he said.

Speaking on behalf of Finland and the EU, Haavisto noted that the EU did not bring up the issue of a possible break in bilateral relations.

He said EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell visited Russia recently, aiming to find common points.

However, the expulsion of three EU diplomats on the day of his visit was taken “heavily,” he said.

Russia can build relations with each of the EU countries separately, but most of them are members of the EU, and this factor will always play a role, regardless of the format of the relations, Haavisto said.

He added that if Russia breaks off relations with the EU, its citizens will be excluded from the Schengen area and will have to get a visa for each country they plan to visit.