At an international forum on collective security in Moscow, Alexey Drobinin said that Russia could reach agreements with “individual NATO countries” that in essence meet the criteria of mutual non-aggression pacts, Agence reported.
According to the director of the Foreign Policy Planning Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Moscow is offering “potential participants in the architecture of Eurasian security” several formats of agreements. The first option is defensive alliances with obligations to provide mutual assistance in the event of aggression, following the example of the CSTO.
Drobinin cited Russia’s mutual assistance agreements with Belarus and North Korea as examples of such agreements. The second option, he said, is political agreements on mutual refusal to support each other’s opponents in the event of aggression, and he cited the agreement between Russia and Iran as an example.
The third option, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry representative, is bilateral agreements that in their meaning meet the criteria of non-aggression pacts. He added that such agreements could also be reached with individual NATO member states, which in that case would receive additional individual security guarantees from Russia.
Among other possible measures, Drobinin named mutual obligations not to engage in hostilities against each other in any form, as well as a refusal to provide territory, transit, industrial, and other capabilities for conducting such actions. He also mentioned the coordination of confidence-building measures of a political and military nature.
After the start of the war in Ukraine, Moscow had already proposed that Europe agree on mutual non-aggression. In November last year, at the CSTO summit in Kyrgyzstan, Vladimir Putin said he was ready to “formalize” Russia’s commitment not to attack European countries, and in December Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was ready to sign such a document with Europe.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin issued the West an ultimatum whose content in fact implied a revision of the European security architecture. In the Soviet period, the USSR did indeed sign non-aggression treaties, including with West Germany, which was then already a NATO member, and later — an agreement providing for a mutual commitment not to help the aggressor.
Discussion of the security architecture in Europe became one of the topics of the trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE.
