Lavrov calls terrorism major global threat of last year

MOSCOW, January 17. /TASS/. Terrorism was the key global threat in 2016 but the international community is unable to unite to fight against it, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at an annual press conference on Tuesday. "The number of threats did not decrease last year, I mean first of all the threat of global terrorism that continued doing its mean work. The citizens of Europe, the Middle East and other countries suffered from it, and we lost our Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov as a result of a vile terrorist act," the top Russian diplomat said. Lavrov stressed that terrorism has become of "a systemic character." He voiced concerns and regret that the international community cannot unite "to create a joint front to combat terrorism." Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed this during his speech at the UN in September 2015, Lavrov recalled. A range of reasons create obstacles for joining efforts, he said. "This problem faces basic contradictions between the objective tendency of formation of the multipolar world on the one hand and the actions of those who try to stick to the outdated concept of multipolarity," he explained. Another reason is a contradiction in basic principles of foreign policy of different countries, he said. "This is pragmatism, good and well-understood national interests or messianism (belief in a messiah) and drive to spread one’s values around the world, in a way they were implemented in this group of countries," he said. Read more