Addressing the 22nd meeting of the Conference of Heads of Security Agencies and Intelligence Services of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries in St. Petersburg today, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, warned his counterparts from the former members of the Soviet Union, that “the risk of a large-scale conflict across the entire Eurasian space is quite real.”
Western politicians have become hostage to their own propaganda about the Russian threat, while “European leaders believe in `controlled escalation,’ in a strategy of balancing on the brink,” he warned. “Diplomacy no longer works in this situation, and the powers are literally plunging into total war, often with devastating consequences for everyone.”
He was adamant: “We must prevent such a development of events.” History, thank God, he added, has given us “examples albeit few, of a successful way out of the escalation spiral” underway today. Here he cited the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the “Soviet Union and the United States managed to make mutual concessions and prevent them from going to nuclear war.”
The driver of the conflict is the refusal of the old world order to accept the integration efforts of the sovereign nations of Eurasia (the SCO, CIS, etc.), Naryshkin stressed. He reminded the others at the meeting that Western intelligence agencies view the CIS countries only as a “buffer zone, control over which will make ensuring the strategic defeat of existential adversaries—Russia and China—possible.”
