18 Oct 2019 10:25

Russia urges BRICS partners to focus on minimizing conflict risks, ensuring missile and nuclear stability - Patrushev

BRASILIA. Oct 18 (Interfax) - Russia calls on its BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) partners on the international stage to focus on minimizing the risks of conflicts, ensuring stability in the nuclear missile sphere, and tackling other priority issues, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said at a meeting of high-ranking security officials from the BRICS countries in Brasilia on Friday.

"Today it is important for us to focus on the following top-priority tasks: to minimize the risks of an armed conflict, give up any bloc mentality and a policy of new dividing lines, ensure strategic stability in the missile and nuclear sphere, and gradually resolve all conflicts," he said.

Other objectives include "adapting the international security system to new realities" and "renouncing the practice of unilateral sanctions and discriminatory regimes," he said.

When speaking about global, regional, and national challenges to international security, Patrushev said that the BRICS countries "are at the forefront of the fight against growing threats to the entire international community."

The system of international relations is becoming ever-more complex, and the world is facing ever-more acute inconsistencies caused by uneven development, the growing gap between the welfare levels of different countries, and the intensifying competition for resources, sales markets, and control over key shipping routes, he said.

"At the same time, certain states still refuse to accept the objective realities of the changing world and continue thinking in Cold War-era terms. Attempts to impose their own scale of values on other countries only serve to stoke xenophobia, intolerance, and conflict potential in international affairs," Patrushev said.