MOSCOW. Dec 1 (Interfax) - Russia and the West are unlikely to be able to normalize their common work to promote European security, and there will be no more business as usual in this field, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
"If and when our Western neighbors - and there's no escaping this neighborhood - and former partners get suddenly interested at some point in somehow restoring our common work on European security, this restoration will be impossible, because restoration means returning to something that was before. But there'll be no business as usual," Lavrov said at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday.
"When and if the West comes to understand that, after all, a neighborhood is better when it rests on some agreed-upon basis, well, we'll listen to what the West has to offer," Lavrov said.
"Clearly, these should be some fundamentally new principles. I don't know whether there'll be an opportunity for such interaction in the foreseeable future," he said.
He also criticized the Polish chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2022.
"I can say responsibly that Poland's anti-chairmanship of the OSCE will take an utterly miserable place in this organization's history. Nobody has ever caused such damage to the OSCE while being at its helm," he said.
Western countries have been making efforts for years "not to allow a system of equal and indivisible European security to be formed, despite all the incantations they've made in political declarations," Lavrov said.
"And we're now reaping the fruits of this absolutely shortsighted and erroneous policy," he said.
"The spirit and the letter of the OSCE's basic documents have been trampled upon," Lavrov said.
"The OSCE was set up for a common European dialogue back then. All of this raises difficult questions as to what our relations with the OSCE will be like. And what perhaps is even more important is what's going to happen to the OSCE itself," he said.