High-level security and intelligence officials from eight of the nine countries forming the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan— held their 17th meeting on this week (Oct. 13-14) in Moscow. Near the end of the first day of discussions, Putin was invited to address the meeting. He urged participants to build on the “common past, centuries-long experience of friendship and productive cooperation, and millions of intertwined human destinies” which unite their nations, to cooperate both against the threats from drugs, terrorism, transnational crime, etc., and to protect the expansion of the region’s productive capacities through economic integration from those foreign interests who would “interfere and trip us up.”
Putin then asked the Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Sergei Naryshkin to speak. Naryshkin spoke briefly, but pointedly focused on the efforts to “trip us up,” in the name of a false “democracy.”
Participants held “quite a detailed conversation” that first day, he reported, on “topical matters related to our cooperation in the context of new, hybrid threats our countries face, as we know, from a group of Western states.
“What causes these threats is primarily the fact that the United States and its allies persist in their attempts to export, may I say, their Western values, or totalitarian-liberal values, as I call them, in order to influence our countries into changing our domestic and foreign policy.”
Naryshkin named the United States as the coordinator of the step-up in “totalitarian-liberal … hybrid warfare” against their nations and citizens, but noted that the Biden administration had been forced to reject force as a means to promote “democracy,” because the rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan “was a heavy blow to the reputation of Washington as the leader of the liberal world,” even if the White House thinks that the Summit for Democracy planned for the end of this year will “convince the international community that the United States is strong and ready to lead the entire world.”
He cited the “other destructive plans” underway from Washington: efforts to expand U.S. presence in Central Asia, the AUKUS alliance, “as well as plans nurtured by Washington and its allies to incite instability ahead of elections at various levels to be held in our countries in the coming years.” (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66919)
